Chantefleurs et Chantefables ("Songflowers and Songfables") is one of the most gracious and affecting works of Lutoslawski's last years. It was premiered at the London Promenade Concerts on August 8, 1991 by soprano Solveig Kringleborn and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with the composer conducting.

Chantefleurs et Chantefables makes no use of aleatoric counterpoint until the fast-moving final song. Until then the piece is highly conservative, both in its softly dappled textures, reminiscent of Debussy, and in its tonally-derived harmony. It is not, however, unoriginal. Although the work never uses functional harmony per se, triads, seventh chords, bitonal, quartal, and added-note chords are used freely and unambiguously, while in more rhythmically active sections the composer uses arpeggiation-like figures to tactfully explore a fuller use of chromatic possibilities. Temporary centers of pitch are established gently through repetition or through orchestrational emphasis. Quintuple meter (5/8, 5/4) is used frequently in both fast and slow contexts, giving the rhythms a floating-world quality.

The poetry, of course, deserves special mention, not least since it concludes Lutoslawski's longtime love affair with the French language. Robert Desnos wrote some of the most important French verse of the first half of the century, prized for its deft and easy mixture of dream and reality, the innocent and the surreal, the concrete and the abstract. The composer felt that the structures of Desnos' poems invited musical settings; he had used some previously for another masterpiece, Les Espaces du sommeil (1975) for baritone and large orchestra. Beneath the childlike imagery of the Chantefleurs verses, Lutoslawski sometimes brings out dark undertones, in places you might expect (the angelica poem) and in places you might not (the tale of the flower and the bull).

There are nine songs, each subtly different from the others. The first and third, made from poems of six lines, both use slight rhythmic differentiations in the two violin parts to establish a hazy mood, offset by twinkling tones of piano and bells in "La Belle-de-Nuit," sharp brass chords in "La Véronique." "La Sauterelle" is a deft scherzo based on the little interval of the major second, mimicking the grasshopper's jumps; its companion piece, "L'Eglantine, l'Aubépine et la Glycine" (The Dogrose, the Hawthorn and the Wisteria) uses another narrowing device—good old strophic form—until the final line, when a bird keeps whamming itself into the poor flowers and the form cracks open. "La Tortue" (The Tortoise) and "L'Alligator" are humorous nursery tales, "La Rose" and "L'Angélique" rapturous lyrics of timeless beauty. The finale, partially aleatoric, is a change, its "three hundred million butterflies" descending on the poor towns of Châtillon in scampering, jazzy bass lines.

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