Juxtaposing Lutosławski’s Funeral Music in memory of Béla Bartók (1956-58) with the Hungarian’s Divertimento (1939) is apt beyond the textural common string-orchestral ground. Bartók was creative godfather to the Pole, whose musical gravestone references the Divertimento obliquely. The obvious coupling – perhaps too obvious – would have been the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta but the Romanian Folk Dances, given here in the familiar 1937 string-orchestral transcription by Arthur Willner, act as a kind of creative corrective (not for the first time on disc), moving back towards the raw material from which Bartók’s creativity – and, at a further remove, Lutosławski’s own – sprang. This shift is completed by the seven choruses selected from Bartók’s set of 27, themselves but one step away from the folk-music originals.

Dennis Russell Davies elicits finely judged and very refined performances from the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. Their measured account of Lutosławski’s Funeral Music is deeply felt and, while not displacing the composer’s own, gets to the heart of the matter. Ensemble is slick in the Romanian Folk Dances, yet they perhaps lack the last ounce of zip in the Divertimento that the finest of the competition (see over) bring to this invigorating music, whether Solti’s classic version or Gimse’s rewarding but curiously coupled more recent version. The seven choruses provide a surprisingly effective conclusion and are nicely sung, too. Typically superb ECM sound, neatly engineered to hide the six-year gap in recording dates. Well worth investigating.