Festivals
Warsaw's Two Worlds
By DAVID CAIRNS
Tiii first Warsaw Festival of Contemporary Music, in 1956, must have been something to live through. While Moscow stood at the gates, Stravinsky sounded in the halls. The same forces that had culminated, precisely at that moment, in the heroic gamble of the Polish October were flinging down the barriers which had shut Polish music off from its traditional contacts with the West. Musically as well as ideologically, Warsaw became for a few days the centre of the world, the unique place where, in music at least, the East and' the West confronted each other face to face on equal terms. For the first time in a generation Polish composers were free to drink in the forbidden works in intoxicating quantities.
That was three years ago. But the Warsaw Festi- val still keeps that atmosphere of uniqueness, of emotional exultation and intellectual ferment. For someone coming from such an obstinate back- water as London, where the good, even the great, music that is written has miserably little to s'how for itself, the Warsaw mixture is as exhilarating as it is strenuous. It is made up of ingredients that give an enviable richness to .Polish musical life : an eager but discriminating audience which is given the chance to be adventurous; at least three orchestras--the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Polish
Radio and the Silesian Chamber Orchestra—that have learnt to play the toughest contemporary scores with dazzling expertise and conviction; a crop of brilliant young conductors, most of them also active composers, who are driven neither by inclination nor system into dull repetition of 'the repertoire': and finally a programme of works which piquantly juxtaposes in Warsaw, as no- where else, the rival products of two worlds.
It is this that gives the festival its unequalled fascination. One may object : should not a piece of music be heard and judged simply as a piece of music? But what in the West is a bland axiom, which few feel either the need or the energy to question, is a live issue in Eastern Europe-- thanks to Warsaw, a liver issue than ever before. The fact that Polish composers are free to com- pose (and Polish painters to paint) as they please has reopened the whole case of the role of cul- ture in a Communist State. The Warsaw Festival has established itself as protagonist of musical 'co-existence,' as an agreed field of 'peaceful com- petition' between conflicting systems.
Moscow seems to look on this novel state of affairs without serious qualms. This year it sent one of its most famous ensembles, the splendid Beethoven Quartet (who played the fifth and sixth quartets of Shostakovitch with a spontaneous flow of strong, unaffected tone that would make them a wonderfully welcome antidote, over here, to the two prevailing Western styles, the finicky and the high octane). Its chief observer was Shostak- ovitch himself, who, apart from walking out before the end of a grossly protracted display of musique concrete by the French engineer Pierre Schaeffer. attended faithfully at all the concerts. The influential editor of Soviet Music, J. Kieldysz. while criticising the general choice of works as onesidedly avunt-garde, has said that the festival is 'certainly worth while and ought to continue. • From a Western point of view one can see co-existence already beginning to work fruitfully in NI. Kieldysz"s.statement that 'it would be wrong to reject the Whole of dodecaphonic music outright as "formalist," • and in a Czech critic's admission that a piece of Schonberg's was 'among those works which till very recently were unjustly neglected by us.' They may object to Schonberg's pessimism and morbid emotionalism (and how right they are!) and continue to assert that his genius could never fulfil itself because his view of life was 'false,' but they no longer can nor need to conceal a fascination with his . actual works. To the same Czech, the admirable thing about the Warsaw Festival is precisely this 'confrontation of the world of Schbnberg, Berg and Webern with the world, of Prokofiev and Shostakovitch' (no mention yet of Stravinsky, however!). Even for the most servile satellite commentator the festival, however little he may like it, serves at least to demonstrate the crushing superiority of the great Soviet masters and the definitive rout of the bourgeois decedents.
For the Poles themselves the choice at the moment is simple. With their present appetite for all things new and Western, they have plunged into dodecaphony up to the neck, young and old. Students insist on being taught it, and their teachers catch the virus from them. At the open- ing concert of the festival the Warsaw Philhar- monic, under Witold Rowicki, performed a pre- war Toccata by the distinguished old composer and teacher Boleslav Szabelski (they also played, superbly, the Webern Six Pieces—connoisseurs of the London musical scene may be interested in a Polish report that the orchestra's English agent has been asking for Tchaikovsky's Fifth Sym- phony when they appear at the Festival Hall this winter). No amount of bravura in performance could disguise its hollow brashness and penury of ideas. Two days later Jan Krenz and the Polish Radio Orchestra played the inventive Nonoesque First Symphony of Szabelski's pupil Gorecki. But the final panel in this bizarre triptych was only added three days after that, when Szabelski's own latest work was given—Improvisations for choir and chamber orchestra, written in a full-blown, uncompromisingly advanced idiom; and what- ever one may feel about this admittedly striking piece, it was vastly preferable to the Toccata.
The moral of this tale was underlined at a concert of East German chamber music, in which the stupefying inanity of works by Herren Ger- ster, Dessau and Fidelio F. Finke proclaimed in notes of one syllable the ultimate bankruptcy of socialist realism; in that dreary nightlight, the worst twelve-note excess seemed reasonable. This was an extreme case. But while for a few, for Britten and Shostakovitch, for Tippett, it is pos- sible to write music that is new and original and at the same time, from a Darmstadt standpoint, highly traditional, for many others the alternative is experiment or stale repetition. The Poles have mostly chosen experiment; if the proportion of good music they produce is exceedingly thin, that is to be expected. Little good music is written at any one time, let alone in a period and milieu of violent artistic upheaval. The Poles are planting for the future. Lutoslawski's moving and masterly work for double string orchestra In Memoriam Bela Bartok, heard at the 1958 festival and per- formed last month at Venice, is one fruit of this already, and there will be others.
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