As anybody who has ever arranged a formal dinner for 1,000 people will be aware, no one is ever grateful for a set menu. The best you can hope for is inoffensive boredom: tomato soup, roast chicken and fruit salad (and by no stretch of the imagination can Schmidt, Busoni or Lutoslawski be compared with any of those). The three courses here are a vast tureen of richly pungent goulash (half the guests cry ''over-spiced!'' or ''too heavy!'', others wrinkle their noses at the gristly bits), a noble and complex cassoulet (the garlic-haters, the weight-watchers and those for whom 'plain' and 'good' are gastronomic synonyms form a rebelious alliance and begin to throw bread at the waiters), and an elaborate ice pudding stuffed with crystallized fruit and drenched with vodka, accompanied by a dish of bitter salted almonds (clamorous demands for sodium bicarbonate and the resignation of the chef).
Chacun a son gout, and mine is for Busoni. His two 'studies' (in fact an indissolubly linked pair of extended fantasies on themes, both musical and philosophical, from his opera Doktor Faust) are rather close to a masterpiece, I think. A musical alchemist broods on the magic power of unifying counterpoint, of self-renewing ostinato, of the planet-like circling of chains of thirds, and weaves dark orchestral magic himself: you would swear that the richly sombre colour of the ''Sarabande'' is centred on the timbres of clarinets and horns, but both are omitted from Busoni's orchestra. Schmidt enthusiasts will relish the wealth of combinatorial, modulatory, canonic and analytic skill that he lavishes on his brief and very simple gipsy tunelet (and even those who do not much care for Schmidt, finding the whole structure a huge fuss over little more than nothing, half an hour of learned manner expended upon two-penn'orth of substance, may be charmed by the central sequence of quicker variations in which Elgar's Dorabella visits her East European relations).
Lutoslawski's admirers will be intrigued to find him enthusiastically standing up for tonality, romanticism and the symphony orchestra in his pre-war Variations (hugely energetic, high-strung and colourful, the influences of Szymanowski and Stravinsky not yet quite digested or reconciled) and then pronouncing their imminent demise in the enigmatic Postlude of 20 years later: it is a brief and precisely calculated canonic auto-destruction mechanism (though a brief quotation, again from Stravinsky, suggests doubts or regrets). I cannot imagine any Busonian, any Schmidtite or Lutoslawskophile sitting down to the entire meal with unalloyed pleasure, but each will find his dish expertly cooked (the Polish orchestra is a little less adroit than the two English ones, but all the recordings are excellent).'