Surprisingly, this was the Warsaw Philharmonic’s first visit to the Proms, invited as part of this year’s focus on Polish music. About time too, one might say, and particularly so with it being both Lutosławski’s centenary year (and almost Panufnik’s too, shy by a year), and this the farewell concert of outgoing Artistic Director of twelve years, Antoni Wit. It was also only right that they should debut with Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra, composed specially for this orchestra – well, an earlier generation – in the 1950s, and they brought a proprietary authority to the work, from the driving timpani thumps of the opening. Lutosławski here uses melodic material from the Polish folk music tradition, but within the context of a highly-structured compositional form, with more than a nod to Bartók and Stravinsky. This was a high-definition performance which paid great attention to all the fine details of phrasing, dynamics, colour combinations and textural contrast, without ever compromising on overall shape or momentum. I particularly liked the light simplicity the wind and string soloists brought to the more obviously folky elements, easing off on vibrato and never over-shaping the melodies. The skittering, fragmentary second movement and jazz-tinged, punchy third whipped through a range of moods and styles which really did act as a showpiece for what the orchestra can do.
Panufnik was not only a contemporary of Lutosławski’s, but a close friend. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, when public concerts were banned, they formed a piano duo and played their own arrangements of classic repertoire in cafés. However, in 1942 Panufnik was permitted to conduct a charity concert, and composed for it the Tragic Overture, a ferociously aggressive, abrasively dissonant onslaught, in which the brief, innocent-sounding lyrical interludes are in fact fragments of the anti-Nazi protest songs he wrote in secret. The post-war Lullaby is a very different creature – and it is a credit to Wit and the Warsaw Philharmonic that they could so effortlessly and immediately change the atmosphere in the auditorium. In this piece, each of the string section principals in turn play a simple pentatonic song, accompanied by lightly-pinging harp droplets – so far, so lullaby-like – but the radically innovative aspect is in the rest of the string orchestra, who drift around in 29-part microtonal clusters. Panufnik intended this to represent dark clouds drifting across a full moon, over a river, and with it, the Warsaw strings created something fragile, hypnotic, and after a while, quite unsettling (in the best way!)