It's my guess that posterity will judge Witold Lutoslawski as among the supreme twentieth-century musical colourists. All four works included on this superbly refurbished CD share an acute sense of texture, with the Symphonic Variations (1938) serving as a sort of changing room where the composer busily experiments with all manner of musical dress. But thereafter, dormant characteristics take on a stronger form, although my ears detect a good deal of Roussel in the First Symphony (1941-7), both in terms of texture and design. The Funeral music for Bartok (Musique funebre, 1956-8) is a powerful synthesis of original thought and active homage, with plentiful reminders of the master himself—especially of his Divertimento for strings.
The real ground-breaker, however, is the Second Symphony, a seething, structured mass in two parts: the first, nervous and diffuse (with strikingly original passagework for piano and percussion), the second—which arrives without a break—initially dense, but ultimately ethereal. It's interesting to note that in this 1976-7 recording, Lutoslawski balances the movement timings within two seconds of each other, whereas its 1968 Polskie Nagrania predecessor (which has suffered terribly in its transfer to CD) has the second as almost two minutes longer than the first. Jan Krenz's 1964 performance of the First Symphony (also on Polskie Nagrania) is a little more incisive than Lutoslawski's, but less well recorded. All in all, this must surely count as the introduction to Lutoslawski's symphonic world, and Julian Haylock's helpful notes offer the uninitiated plenty of useful musical signposts.'