When Penderecki’s Piano Concerto was heard at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in 2002 it was widely condemned as ‘stale’ and ‘awful’. The composer tended to regard such judgements as more relevant to musical life in Poland than to his own work. But, not long after conducting a recording of the concerto’s original version for the Polish Dux label, he provided it with a new final section, first heard in Cincinnati in 2007. The soloist on that occasion, Barry Douglas, eventually recorded this version with the Warsaw Philharmonic under Antoni Wit for Naxos, coupled with Penderecki’s Flute Concerto from 1992. All of which makes Hänssler Classic’s decision to issue another performance in splendid isolation on a relatively short-play CD something of a mystery.

The performance itself has all the necessary gusto and flamboyance. The new ending does little or nothing to tone down the aggressive exuberance of the original, an American commission which while in progress turned (it would appear) into a defiant riposte to the horrors of 9/11; hence the Mahlerian subtitle Resurrection. Hänssler Classic is to be commended for providing such an unvarnished account of the work’s initial reception in the booklet; and dividing the single-movement concerto into five tracks, with a full listing of the many shifts of tempo and mood that the score contains, gives a good sense of the piece’s origins as a ‘capriccio’. What for some – not least in Poland – represents ‘the belated triumph of Socialist Realism’ might for others be a refreshingly candid attempt to show the kind of music Rachmaninov might have written had he lived a century later. Either way, it’s certainly not boring.