The third volume in Chandos’s welcome Lutosławski series brings a second helping of purely orchestral fare in a programme spanning the Polish master’s entire career. Proceedings are launched in irrepressible fashion with the Symphonic Variations that the budding 25-year-old composer finished in 1938 while still a student at the Warsaw Conservatory. His teacher, Witold Maliszewski, was scathing (‘For me your work is ugly’); however, in a performance as vivacious and committed as this one, it comprises a veritable treat, for the music is personable, resourceful and witty, and scored with colourful assurance to boot.

Three years later, Lutosławski completed his Variations on a Theme of Paganini, a dazzlingly inventive showpiece for two pianos; this arrangement for piano and orchestra was written in 1978 at the behest of Felicja Blumental (who went on to give the premiere in Miami the following year). Louis Lortie makes quite a splash with it and is no less scrupulously appreciative of those dependable virtues (among them elegance of form, generous lyricism and tumbling fantasy) that distinguish the strongly communicative Piano Concerto that Lutosławski fashioned for Krystian Zimerman in 1987-88. Plaudits, too, for Gardner’s conception of the riveting Fourth Symphony (1988-92), which has both infectious involvement and considerable expressive ardour to commend it, if not quite the supreme composure and cumulative power of Salonen’s unerringly paced pioneering account with the LAPO.

Throughout, Gardner secures some
first-class playing from the BBC SO; Ralph Couzens’s engineering is, needless to say, state-of-the-art. Cordially recommended – and next up, I gather, is a coupling of the Cello Concerto (with Paul Watkins as soloist) and Second Symphony.