The Naxos Szymanowski series continues its estimable task of placing relatively familiar major works in appropriate but less familiar contexts. The ballet Harnasie is a powerful complement to the opera King Roger, giving similarly Dionysian subject-matter a very different dramatic setting. Szymanowski’s joyous embrace of folk idioms in Harnasie, and his relish for exploring them in ways which retain certain points of contact with his earlier late-romantic opulence, invites comparisons with Bartók and Janá∂ek in the years after the First World War. But Harnasie has a very personal, Polish aura to it, well projected in this robust yet technically secure account by Antoni Wit and his Warsaw forces, including brief contributions from the veteran yet still strong-voiced Wiesπaw Ochman.

The other examples of Szymanowski’s theatre music are rarities, and neither quite convinces as a concert work. Mandragora was designed for a 1920 Warsaw production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme and depicts, all too episodically, the mugging and mayhem of various attempts to entertain the assembled company – a scenario best known from Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. The incidental music Szymanowski provided in 1925 for the final act of Prince Potemkin, a Polish play about Russian history, was left in manuscript during the composer’s lifetime, and he might well have been surprised to learn of its revival apart from its original function. While not entirely lacking in character, it comes across as rather dull, even in a performance as accomplished, committed and decently recorded as this one.