Musique funèbre [Muzyka zalobna] (1958)
(Funeral Music)

…Lutoslawski’s Musique Funèbre is a work of extraordinary refinement, intimate and immense, its sepulchral pulse strong and slow through an arc of fragmented dances, flecked spiccato, dusty pizzicato, gauzy tremolandi and fevered trills.

Both the Lutoslawski works in Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first programme were built on what the composer called his ‘chain’ principle, by which two or more strands of music were in effect braided together. But before this device was reached in Musique funebre – the first Lutoslawski work to attract international attention – one heard an anguished movement pursuing the contrapuntal course of a tritone (the ‘devil’s interval’)...

…Musique Funèbre, the intense string elegy that Lutosławski completed in 1958 as a memorial to Bartók, and in which many of the techniques of his later music are prefigured.

After the interval came a reminder that Lutoslawski was capable of kindling overt passion within his tautly formalized, ascetic compositions. Funeral music for strings, written in memory of Bartok, dates from between 1956-1958, and preceded his experiments with aleatory methods, manifesting instead a strict serial construction.
But its four movements sustained a searing threnody attaining a climax in the third movement, Apogeum, before resolving into the calm of the final epilogue under the composer’s baton, the BBC strings interpreted this piece with the ardour it deserved.