Having written a series of small folkloristic pieces for various instruments and their combinations (piano, clarinet with piano, chamber ensemble, orchestra, voice with orchestra), Lutosławski decided to use his experience of stylisation of Polish folklore in a bigger work.
However, the Concerto for Orchestra differs from Lutosławski's earlier folkloristic pieces not only in that it is more extended, but also in that what is retained from folklore is only melodic themes.
The composer moulds them into a different reality, lending them new harmony, adding atonal counterpoints, and turning them into neo-baroque forms.
The three movements are: The Corale's second appearance produces a solemn finale for the monumental construction, the material for which is borrowed from a nineteenth-century collection compiled by the Polish ethnologist Oskar Kolberg.
However, once Lutosławski embarked on a style marked by heavy aleatoricism in the early 1960s, he attempted to distance himself from the Concerto for Orchestra, though he conducted it in Copenhagen in August 1967 upon receiving a $10,000 prize from a Danish foundation.