Live performances by a student orchestra, some of them recorded ten years ago: can a full-price release be justified? That depends on how highly you value souvenirs of what must have been quite special occasions – and also on how you respond to this substantial cross-section of Lutoslawski’s music, not duplicated on any other CD.
The performance of the Cello Concerto conducted by the composer is not a match for others currently available, mainly because the recording gives Louise Hopkins too little chance to take control. Compare the extended opening solo with Rostropovich’s immediately gripping account and the difference is obvious. Nor would I claim that the brief Prelude for GSMD is one of Lutoslawski’s better pieces. Novelette most certainly is a good piece, and the 1997 performance under Wojciech Michniewski is strongly articulated, if less polished in some of its details that the composer’s own version. The Guildhall orchestra’s playing of the Second Symphony is even better, and although nothing can persuade me that the first of the two movements isn’t far too long, the alarms and excursions of the second are well sustained in a reading that gives the best (and better recorded) alternative, under Esa-Pekka Salonen, a good run for its money.'