Omaggio per Quattro Pianoforti ed Orchestra in Memoriam Jorge Luis Borges (1987) for four pianos and orchestra

The inaugural concert of the 1988 Warsaw Autumn featured the last premiere of a work by Tomasz Sikorski. Omaggio in Memoriam Borges per Quattro Pianoforti Concertanti ed Orchestra – is the title on the manuscript score of the composition, which was written in the spring of 1987. Omaggio was premiered by the pianists Andrzej Dutkiewicz, Szábolcs Esztényi, Eugeniusz Knapik and Krzysztof Meyer, and the Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Karol Stryja.

The programme booklet contains the following comments by Tomasz Sikorski:

Omaggio, a piece dedicated to the memory of Borges, was meant neither to illustrate nor to interpret his work, though I cannot resist the temptation to quote him now using his own words: It is a tiny piece in the network which we call the history of the universe or the cosmic process. It is a part of that network which holds the stars, agony, journeys, sea voyages, moons, fireflies, insomnia, cards, anvils, Carthage and Shakespeare. The part which will never be poetry or dream is also a part of that network.

Elżbieta Szczczepańska-Malinowska described the piece in Ruch Muzyczny in the following manner:

In his Omaggio Sikorski has wisely introduced clear dividing lines: a period dominated by the pianos is followed by a period dominated by the woodwind, then percussion, then a large body of strings, which also repeat, however, tiny variations of one sound pattern of ‘G sharp-A-E (G sharp)’; finally we have a return of the pianos full of a light, discreet jingling of thirds, and, at times, also second-based steps. What we remember from the first phase of the work is a unison ‘C’, then a seventh chord of ‘C-E-G-B flat’ that could provide a dominant for ‘F’, but does not, then trailing spectra of sound permutations and pale shadows of tonality (e.g. a return to ‘C-G’ but based on structures too similar to clusters to make any tonal identification possible).

Typically of Sikorski, the structure of the work is based on modules. There are clearly distinguished three parts: piano part, orchestral part and again piano part. Thus the composer uses here a classic arch form (the piece begins and ends pp), which can also be called a framework (the related outer parts frame the middle part). However, these are not the elements that constitute the work’s strength – their main function is to maintain order. The most interesting element, it would seem, is the way note combinations are put together, as a result of which the modules based on them seem to flow naturally from each other. Sikorski also manages to balance out the melodic and the harmonic factors of his music. In a way that was known only to him he combines the ‘patches of sound’, which he used in the 1970s with melodic ‘strokes’ from the first half of the 1980s, creating something that could be called a stream or a river that sometimes flows rapidly, in a narrow bed, sometimes overflows its banks, creates bays or changes its course forming oxbow lakes. However, the composer achieves this effect not by giving up his sensitivity to sound and changing the direction he embarked on already at the beginning of his compositional career, the direction of going deeper and deeper into his nature.

This was spotted by Jan Weber, who wrote:

Four pianos playing pianissimo create a sound quality completely different from the one created by one piano, which many listeners were unable to grasp and which was – I believe – what the composer intended.

Yet the reception of the piece by the Warsaw audience must be regarded as very enthusiastic. It was greeted with rapturous applause and was encored. The composer was not present at the premiere, because he had become very ill by then.

Omaggio turned out to be a groundbreaking work in Tomasz Sikorski’s oeuvre. However, owing to the composer’s death, this breakthrough was, unfortunately, only a taste of things that could not come.