Lutoslawski Concerto for Cello and Orchestra ^a. Livre pour orchestre. Novelette. Chain 3. ^a Andrzej Bauer (vc); Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra / Antoni Wit.

Naxos (Super budget price) (CD) 8 553625 (73 minutes: DDD).

This is an excellent disc; fine music, well played and recorded, and all at the special Naxos price. It also provides an ideal launching pad for exploring the three earlier issues in Naxos’s Lutoslawski series.

The earliest composition, Livre (1968), was the first work completed by Lutoslawski after the Second Symphony, and it shows him at his freshest and boldest, as if relieved to be free (if only temporarily) from the burden of one of music’s weightiest traditions. With its well-nigh surreal juxtapositions of strongly contrasted materials, and the unusual ferocity of its tone – the ‘book’ in question must have been of the blood and thunder variety – Livre reveals a Lutoslawski quite different from the relatively benign, ironic master of the later works.

Coming immediately after Livre, the Cello Concerto has an even wider expressive range: indeed, in the balance it achieves between lamenting melodic lines and mercurial scherzo-like writing, coupled with a tendency to home in on crucial pitch-centres, it sets out the basic elements of the composer’s later style. This performance is well worth placing alongside the now-historic Rostropovich account, first issued in 1976. It owes a great deal to Antoni Wit’s skilful shaping of the music’s alternations between relatively free and precise notation, and this skill is even more evident in the remaining orchestral scores. These performances are, in general, more vivid and confident than the composer’s own.

Novelette, completed in 1979, is Lutoslawski’s response to his first American commission, and although it anticipates some aspects of the Third Symphony’s more expansive and conventional pages, it is far more cogent and concentrated than its title might lead you to expect. Chain 3 (1986) is one of the best later works, let down only by some rather perfunctory quasi-tonal harmony near the end. But this does not undermine the impression the disc as a whole conveys of some of the most characterful and individual music of the last 30 years.

AW