Thirteen years ago these recordings provided a more than welcome stop-gap for those of us keen to encounter one of the most interesting, if tantalising, voices in Polish late-Romantic music. Mieczyslaw Karlowicz died at the age of 32 in an avalanche in the Tatra mountains, before his striking talent had the chance to blossom into true individuality, but not before he had composed six symphonic poems in a language evolving from diluted Wagner and Franck, through to the kind of Straussian effusiveness that his 10-years-younger compatriot Szymanowski was also revelling in at the time.

The signs of what might have been are clearest in the late stages of Eternal Songs and in the surging passion of Stanislaw and Anna of Oswiecim, a tale of a brother and sister’s unhappy love. Elsewhere, it would be easy enough to find extracts to entice the new listener; but hearing and rehearing entire works tends to confirm that the still maturing Karlowicz takes too long to get into his stride, too easily falls back on standard harmonic and gestural formulae and is inclined to stretch ideas out well beyond their capacity to sustain interest.

The players of the Silesian State Philharmonic are no match for those of the BBC Philharmonic, willingly though they follow Jerzy Salwarowski’s passionate lead, and the early 1980s Polish recording quality lacks depth and bloom. On the other hand, Yan Pascal Tortelier and his Manchester-based players only cherry-picked the finest of the symphonic poems. So if you need to hear Returning Waves, with its damp version of Wagner’s Magic Fire music and rather flabby structure, or the turbid heavings of A Sorrowful Tale (in which the composer originally planned a revolver shot at the tragic culmination), or the occasionally somewhat Delian rapture of the unfinished Episode at a Masquerade (whose sumptuously scored completion is by Grzegorz Fitelberg) – and if you cannot wait for the BBC Philharmonic to get round to these works (they already have a Rebirth Symphony in the can) – then this has to be for you.