Not a disc to consume at one sitting, I fancy. Each of the three works, though well contrasted and distinctively individual in style, is a meal in itself. The opening of Szymanowski’s Third Symphony, Song of the Night, is up there with the opening tableau of King Roger for sheer sonic splendour. But it’s as if the dome of that Byzantine temple has opened to the dome of heaven and all its shimmering constellations. It’s a musical mosaic, this piece, of golden, light-catching surfaces. It achieves transportation in the rapt wonderment of the solo tenor (excellent Toby Spence) and, in the middle movement, the swooning of its wordless chorus. Valery Gergiev obviously adores the piece and well conveys its intoxication – but the one or two voluptuous climaxes, not least the last and mightiest, though impactful, are perhaps too ‘contained’ by the Barbican Hall acoustic. And though the immediacy and detail are welcome, ideally one wants a more accommodating space in which this music can ring and resound.

The Stabat mater arrives like purification – simple and direct, and cut from the same cloth (though less brazenly Slavic) as Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass. The nature of the text makes for something humbler and more intimate. The opening of the third movement – a duet for contralto and solo clarinet – sums up its ethos, plaintive and archaic with the merest hint of a 20th-century veneer, but the heart of the matter is accessed through the fourth movement, for a cappella chorus and female soloists, where Mary’s lamentation finds expression in beautiful chord progressions. With the sixth movement – where Szymanowski’s soprano rolls out what he described as ‘the most beautiful melody I ever managed to write’ – it still comes as something of a shock to hear how Górecki was so much more than just influenced by that tune in his far better known, indeed now iconic, Third Symphony.

Szymanowski’s Fourth Symphony – written 16 years after the Third when the thicker, heavier, air had well and truly cleared from his compositional technique – sounds more of a concerto than symphonie concertante in this performance, featuring the Russian powerhouse pianist Denis Matsuev, than it did recently with the more discreet Louis Lortie with Edward Gardner on Chandos. Matsuev has his feet more firmly planted on terra firma, the edgier writing displaying more of a kinship with Bartók until the gorgeous return to lushness in the second movement suggests an almost Ravelian sensibility. Certainly Matsuev and Gergiev go all out to turn the finale into Szymanowski’s danse générale.