Naxos here completes its second recorded cycle of Szymanowski’s orchestral works. And that apparent duplication seems less remarkable once you hear the passionate playing and exceptional musical understanding of the Warsaw Philharmonic under their general and artistic director. The early Concert Overture, son of Rosenkavalier and proud of it, is resplendently played here, only at rare moments craving a more glamorous sound stage. And the over-heated two-movement First Symphony, which the composer himself described as a “contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral monstrosity” and withdrew after its premiere, emerges as far more purposeful and less rebarbative than I can remember from any of the admittedly few rival versions that have come and gone over the years.

As a listening experience the Fourth Symphony is initially somewhat more problematic, in that the opening pages (surely the model for Bartók’s Third Piano Concerto) suffer from slight intonation problems between the concertante piano and the orchestra. But with a bit of acclimatisation, helped by the firm and affectionate shaping of the performance, this proves to be liveable with. Jan Krzysztof Broda seems to grow in stature through the rhapsodic slow movement, and he never loses the thread in the finale’s Ravelian and Prokofievian deviations.

All in all, it would take significantly greater financial outlay to find anything better than this, and even then the differences would be marginal.