Lutoslawski Symphony No. 4. Partita ^a. Interlude. Chain 2 ^a. Funeral Music. ^a Krzysztof Bakowski (vn); Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra / Antoni Wit.

Naxos (Super budget price) (CD) 8 553202 (77 minutes: DDD).

Naxos’s super-bargain price foray into the contemporary repertory is all the more commendable for managing to include Lutoslawski’s finest late work, the Symphony No. 4 (1992). The disc demonstrates the enormous distance the composer travelled from the rather dry symmetries of Funeral Music (1958) to the symphony’s beautifully balanced dialogue between lyricism and drama: and it also includes the first recording of the Interlude which Lutoslawski wrote in 1989 to link the two works for violin and orchestra. Having done so, it’s a pity that Naxos didn’t place the pieces in the composer’s preferred order of Partita–Interlude–Chain 2: but this is scarcely a major drawback.

As soloist, Krzysztof Bakowski is several degrees less charismatic than Anne-Sophie Mutter, in whose hands the music sparkles and ruminates to maximum effect. The DG recording also has greater warmth. Indeed, the rather dry quality of the Naxos recording is evident throughout, and helps to make Funeral Music seem more than usually dour. The contrast between the Naxos sound and the far more spacious acoustic which Sony provide for Esa-Pekka Salonen’s version of the symphony is also striking. In places the sheer immediacy of Naxos’s restricted perspective pays dividends, and Antoni Wit’s shaping of the symphony’s satisfyingly substantial structure is well conceived, even if the orchestral playing is less polished, less richly nourished, than that emanating from Los Angeles.

Overall the Sony sound is less one-dimensional than the Naxos, and yet its sheer refinement serves to deprive this score of some of its dramatic immediacy. The field remains open for other interpretations, and other recordings, to strike a better balance.

AW