Mieczysaw Karowicz’s Violin Concerto of 1902 stands at the threshold of the half a dozen Impressionist-Romantic tone poems by which his remarkable talent (cut off in its prime by an avalanche while skiing in the Tatra mountains) is remembered. As such it occupies a worthy place beside numerous worthy post-Bruch-and-Tchaikovsky contemporaries, being warm and charming in tone, idiomatically written and solidly structured, but by comparison with the likes of Sibelius or Elgar almost wholly lacking in individuality. The booklet essay’s description of the concerto as ‘truly visionary’ is surely a bit of a stretch. Still, it receives a sympathetic and confident performance at the hands of Bartomiej Nizio.

Six years on and we are in a different world. Beginning and ending in Stygian gloom, The Sorrowful Tale depicts the last moments of a man about to commit suicide. No contrived redemption à la Strauss, and towards the end the Szczecin Philharmonic recording even reinstates the gunshot that Karowicz later replaced with a tom-tom: as if the narrative were not already explicit enough.

Melancholy runs through the Lithuanian Rhapsody too. ‘I tried to pour into it all the grief, sadness and eternal chains of this people whose songs filled my childhood’, Karowicz related; and in this he surely succeeded. Even so, I couldn’t help craving one of the more brazen of his symphonic poems to complete the disc in its stead.

Dux already has serviceable recordings of the tone poems by the Silesian Philharmonic in its catalogue. These new ones are a degree more richly recorded and characterfully played, but still no match for the tautness and opulence of the BBC Philharmonic on Chandos. As for the Concerto, Tasmin Little on Hyperion is equally persuasive; and for collectors who already have the tone poems, her coupling of Moszkowski might be the tiebreaker.