This album of Polish music has a hidden Beethoven agenda. Grażyna Bacewicz (‘a woman who saved the honour of Polish composers’, her close friend, the composer and music writer Stefan Kisielewski once said) wrote the Overture for Orchestra in Nazi-occupied Warsaw in 1943. The piece includes the ‘V for Victory’ motif from Beethoven’s Symphony No 5. The Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Thomas Søndergård treat it as an orchestral showpiece, a kind of moto perpetuo brimming with energy and brightness of colour. You will find a more sombre interpretation of the overture from the BBC Symphony Orchestra led by Sakari Oramo, while the WDR Symphony Orchestra conducted by Łukasz Borowicz offer the most pronounced ‘V’ motif.

Witold Lutosławski’s Symphony No 3 is a modern classic and there are quite a few recordings to choose from, starting with Lutosławski’s own elegant but restrained version with the Berlin Philharmonic from 1986. I am particularly fond of the recording Esa Pekka Salonen made with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but also return gladly to Edward Gardner’s interpretation with the BBC SO. The symphony, commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and premiered with Georg Solti in 1983, was understood in Poland as a reaction to brutal communist oppression, something Lutosławski neither confirmed nor denied. The piece begins and ends with a rhythmic motif also reminiscent of the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No 5. Søndergård’s recording is a welcome addition to the interpretation history of this masterpiece, radiant and teeming with energy, as if the Danish conductor wanted to liberate this music from the tragic tenor of Polish history.

The last piece on the album is a Symphonic Fantasy on ‘King Roger’ (the opera by Karol Szymanowski), arranged by Iain Farrington. At first listening I was disappointed, as it sounded too much like film music with oriental motifs and scattered scraps of a Richard Strauss tone poem. But I gradually grew to like Farrington’s listener-friendly approach to the maverick Szymanowski. King Roger is an opera about multiple identity crises, a journey from darkness to light (duly culminating in C major), a musical feast of Dionysian ecstasy. In this version, brilliantly performed by the RSNO, we do get to meet Szymanowski’s Dionysus, but only after he has graduated from an English finishing school.