The program also included Witold Lutoslawski's Fourth Symphony, whose world premiere the Philharmonic had given in 1993. It remains a troublesome work. Here again you have to admire the aging composer, and for better reasons than for Strauss. There are wonderful sounds here; the very first measures, with the orchestra emerging from a dark hole and the winds sounding a dire imprecation, arrest the attention. But there is a disturbing disconnectedness about the piece, moments of a dead stop and a resumption somewhere else, that inspires me with the awful suspicion that this marvelous, cherishable composer had run out of energy too soon. The great works of Lutoslawski, not much before this final essay, are robust and teeming; in their shadow, this one work makes me wish it didn't exist.
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