As a country with a limited base of musical patronage in the eighteenth century, and one that suffered a good deal of political instability, Poland had only a modest tradition on which to build in the classical era. It is in this context that one has to listen to these early attempts by Polish composers at the classical, Viennese-style symphony. It is clear, sometimes embarrassingly so, however sympathetically one listens, that these men had little if any training in harmony or counterpoint, for most of the symphonies here are full of technical solecisms: static and unvaried harmonies, harmonies that fail to resolve properly, cliches misused, lengthy trails of sequences, modulations that don't work, empty repetitions and the like—exactly the kind of thing that Mozart parodies in his Musical Joke.
The Orlowski work that opens the disc begins with a conventional enough group of gestures, then lapses into banalities in a grotesque 'development'. Dankowski is a better composer; there are some genuine ideas here and, with clarinets in the orchestra, some attractive textures, but the interest is not long sustained. The ideas in the Namieyski piece, the longest on the disc, are very slender and the technique is insecure. Pawlowski's single movement is very feeble and the works by Engel, even if the invention shows one or two sparks of imagination, are so trite in the working-out as to make the music seem like a parody of the Musical Joke. This isn't, of course, a specific criticism of Polish music; there are hundreds of symphonies by English, Germans, Italians and so on that are just as bad, maybe even worse. The players do what they can and generally play with spirit, but making the music interesting lies well beyond them or anyone else.'