Placing the earliest (1963) and most recent (1997) works together at the beginning of this programme neatly confirms that Penderecki didn’t simply regress from radical to conservative during these three decades. Even though the Three Pieces in the Antique Style are film-music pastiche rather than a fully fledged concert item, they convey a relish for decorous late-Romantic expressiveness that eventually supplanted the modish avant-garde alarms and excursions for which he was best known in the 1960s.

The Capriccio for oboe and strings (1964) represents Penderecki’s personal angle on Sixties modernism and packs a considerable punch despite its derivative qualities. As late as 1973, the Intermezzo for 24 strings projects an expressionistic attitude to texture and structure that still impresses today, especially in a performance as full-blooded as this one. After that, the two Sinfoniettas – the first (1992) adapted from a String Trio, the second (1994) from a Clarinet Quartet – seem much more pallid, all too prone to the kind of nondescript, quasi-improvisatory lyric rambling that is occasionally interrupted by something more energetic but which never builds into the kind of truly postmodern evolutionary design that might have been the intention. Only in the second movement of the Sinfonietta No 1 does something approaching a strongly shaped musical argument emerge. As for the two-movement Serenade (1997), there’s plenty of fervent intensity in the way Antoni Wit and the Warsaw Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra put the music across but that can’t compensate for lack of energy and personality in the actual ideas.