What a journey is on offer here. This set proposes a kind of luxury musical package-tour for the jet-set age – today expressionist Austria, tomorrow Slavic fantasy, the day after high-romanticism in Germany, and then away for a weekend in the exotic realms of the Near East. The different locales here just materialise out of thin air, colourful, fully formed, without a moment for the traveller to get bored on the way.

Szymanowski’s song output is doubly intriguing – first, for those far-flung contrasts of style; second, because it is so little known. Half a lifetime of attending live recitals is unlikely to bring one into much contact with his songs, apart from the Songs of the Fairy Princess, which come round from to time in their orchestral version. Of course, the Polish language is an issue, but this admirable set reminds us that there are also songs in German and even a James Joyce cycle in English.

Four singers take part, one to each disc. Piotr Beczala is a light, poetic young tenor, who also has some passion up his sleeve. He is dreamily captivating in the early Six Songs of Op 2, where Fauré and Rachmaninov seem to be whispering ideas alternately over Szymanowski’s shoulders; catches well the change of tone to religious concentration in the Three Fragments by Jan Kasprowicz; and brings lyric beauty to the Schoenberg-inspired Op 13 settings.

Soprano Juliana Gondek is less appealing. Her voice is a touch brittle for the sultry mood Szymanowski must have had in mind for the Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin and a bit more could be made of the words in the Joyce cycle. Yet there is still much to enjoy: why don’t the Bunte Lieder, with their Viennese air of cultured enjoyment, come round in recitals today?

The third disc introduces the sensitive singing of mezzo Urszula Kryger. She plunges straight into the swirling Tristanesque ecstasy of the Wagnerian Op 20 set with its embarrassingly over-written poetry by Tadeusz Mici´nski (it must be tricky not to blush at a line like ‘In the gardens of your breasts apple trees [are] in blossom’). The glinting lights of the Orient return in Des Hafis Liebeslieder, another set of paraphrases by Hans Bethge to place beside Das Lied von der Erde, and the four songs of Op 41 then take us forward into more ambiguous and experimental terrain.

The familiar Songs of the Fairy Princess promise a magical opening to the fourth disc in a winning performance by young Iwona Sobotka, a name to note. Here is a pure, steady, light soprano, who can flit up into the ledger lines where Stravinsky’s very similar Rossignol takes wing without a hint of shrillness. Sobotka is also interesting in the antique Polish songs of the Slopiewnie, Op 46 and makes a lively job of the miniature Children’s Rhymes of Op 49, even if a few of those go rather a long way.

Through all of this the pianist, Reinild Mees, exhibits a faultless sense of atmosphere, whether delicately conjuring Oriental mystery or thundering up and down Lisztian octaves. Those who fight shy of more than an hour of Szymanowski might prefer Dorothy Dorow’s single-disc survey on Etcetera (1/92), but her edgy coloratura affords less enjoyment than this Channel Classics set. The adventurous traveller need look no further.