Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Sir Simon Rattle, there was a significant emphasis on the works of Lutosławski at the Berlin Festival in this, the composer’s centenary year. The Festival neatly marks both the transition from summer into autumn and also that from one programming year into the next. My personal programme for 2013-14 began much as my concert year 2012-13 had ended, with Mariss Jansons and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on full throttle. Conductor and orchestra had enjoyed a fortnight’s break since I heard them at the BBC Proms and also at the Edinburgh Festival, where they gave blazing performances of Mahler’s Symphony No 2, plus renditions of Beethoven’s G Major Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida and two great symphonies that encapsulate the early and the late years of the so-called Romantic Era – the Symphonie Fantastique of Berlioz and Tchaikovsky’s final completed symphony, the Pathétique. Probably the pick of the bunch would have been the Mahler in London and the Tchaikovsky in Edinburgh, but at no point did this world-class ensemble show any hint of the ennui that a whistle-stop tour can easily induce.

In Berlin, the programme on offer was altogether shorter, which may have accounted for the surprisingly large number of empty seats in Scharoun’s wondrous Philharmonie for one of the few pairings of orchestra and music director that can be said to rival what Berlin itself routinely has to offer. The first half brought the Concerto for Orchestra by Lutosławski, the most accessible of his large-scale, major works. This was the fourth excellent performance of the piece I have heard this year, with Jansons characteristically capturing both the work’s special flavour and also reminding those present of its universal appeal, transcending period and style. In Béla Bartók’s work of the same name, he captured beautifully the rhythms as well as the dazzling orchestrations, repeatedly pointing up the grotesqueness in which this composer so often revelled. The quality more than made up for the limited quantity.

One of the great pleasures of my personal ‘Lutosławski Year’, beginning at the end of last year’s BBC Proms, has been the superb advocacy of Sir Simon Rattle for this perennially under-appreciated composer. It strikes me that most of the modern or contemporary music with which Sir Simon is usually associated emanates either from the UK or from Germany, carrying with it the slight implication that the programming may have a filament of political, as well as musical, motivation underpinning it. After his stunning interpretation of Lutosławski’s Symphony No 3 at the Prom on August 31 last year, I was genuinely thrilled at the thought of hearing his ‘take’ on Symphony No 2, the only symphony by Lutosławski that belongs to his second and most avowedly avant-garde phase of composition, which was made possible by the slightly more relaxed political situation from the mid-1950s on.

It’s a tough piece, 12-tone with a heavy dose of aleatoric sections; and not at all for the faint-hearted or the determinedly conservative. The Berlin Philharmonic had not performed the piece since 1978, but the only obvious effect of that was to give this rendition an additional feeling of spontaneity. Of course the sheer beauty of tone seduced, as always it does, but the genuinely warm reception from a sell-out audience suggested that I was not the only one to hear this piece with new ears, rapt and energised. I noticed hitherto obscured fragments of melody and found myself carried along inexorably by the internal logic of a piece that had always seemed to me disparate and dissipated. It is far more of a companion piece to its far more popular sibling the Third Symphony than I had ever realised. Suddenly it struck me that, if there is a ‘black sheep’ in this family, it is surely the First Symphony, whose catchy tunes can lose their charm when one reflects on the straitened political situation in which they were written. Perhaps Christian Gerhaher singing Mahler and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass did more than the Lutosławski did to deliver this packed house (and those performances too were superb), but the Polish centenarian must surely have won new admirers that night. To my eyes and ears at least, Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker are still the team to beat.

The Konzerthausorchester Berlin (formerly the Berlin Symphony Orchestra in the one-time East Berlin) is little known outside Germany, but it has been busy recording symphonic works by Sir Andrzej Panufnik, in advance of his centenary year in 2014, which could do wonders for its international profile. It certainly impressed me in the concert hall, even in the wake of the two concerts detailed above, in a programme combining works by Lutosławski and another notable centenarian, Benjamin Britten. As the excellent essay in the programme book pointed out, not only were the two men direct contemporaries: they were also notable musical prodigies who went on to establish world-famous festivals for the promotion of contemporary music, Britten at Aldeburgh in 1948 and Lutosławski with the Warsaw Autumn Festival from 1956. What is more, even though they walked radically different musical paths, they had great respect for one another and became close personal friends.

Conductor Ilan Volkov has won a Gramophone Award for his recording of the Piano Concerto by Benjamin Britten (with Steven Osborne on Hyperion), but on this occasion his soloist was the young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, already a concert hall veteran at the age of 21. What an extraordinary talent he has, combining virtuosic technique with precocious poetry; a genuine prodigy, but entirely without a hint of waywardness or conceit. The evening opened with another Lutosławski piece – his Venetian Games¸ the work in which he unveiled his (then) experimental aleatoric technique. The Konzerthaus could hardly look more different from the Philharmonie, but, like the Musikverein in Vienna, it is another of those surprisingly small halls, with a big sound. Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem after the interval was overwhelming. I can’t wait to hear the Panufnik recordings.

My last night in Berlin was spent in the company of the Philharmonia Orchestra and their music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, who were giving the final concert in the nine-month tribute to Lutosławski that they have taken around Europe, under the whimsical heading of ‘Woven Words’ . Once again they leavened the canon of the Polish master with other works of musical impressionism, on this occasion evocative pieces by Debussy and Ravel (a rare pleasure to hear Mother Goose in its entirety). When they turned their attentions to Lutosławski, Matthias Goerne excelled before the interval in Les Éspaces du Sommeil on a stage where the work’s dedicatee Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau both performed and recorded the piece, but it was the performance of the Third Symphony, with which the orchestra closed both their concert programme and their international centenary tribute, which truly stormed the heavens.

Salonen worked with Lutosławski and there is no mistaking his intense and sincere devotion, both personal and musical, to the memory of his great mentor and friend. This traversal of the piece that has come closest to bringing Lutosławski’s mature style into the mainstream of the concert hall truly had it all. It was the young Esa-Pekka who, three decades ago, narrowly pipped the composer to the honour of making the first recording of this piece, but, my, how his interpretation has developed and deepened since then. Credit to the players too, who evidently had the work fully in their fingers and embouchures. At the end, as the audience cheered, Salonen held up the score, grinning, radiating his love and admiration for the work and its composer. We cheered some more. At the reception afterwards, he explained that, still, not a day goes by without him thinking about Witold Lutosławski and missing him.

If there has been any special hero in this remarkable and generous centenary year, it has surely been Esa-Pekka Salonen. He has done his old friend proud; and special mention must go to the admirable Adam Mickiewicz Institute and its delightful team, who have supported this trail-blazing celebration so generously, energetically and wholeheartedly, both at home and abroad. They are great ambassadors for their deservedly proud country.

So, the world-feted star ensemble and the pretenders from the south, plus two orchestras that refused to die – the Konzerthaus-Orchestra when communism was overthrown and the Philharmonia when Walter Legge withdrew his love and support – had combined to create an unforgettable series. The binding thread was Witold Lutosławski himself and his meticulous method of shifting power – partially but unmistakably – from the usually controlling hand and mind of the conductor, to the musicians themselves. The consequence of those aleatoric sections, where individual musicians, for a clearly delineated period, choose their own tempi – is that no conductor can ever wholly give ‘his’ (or ‘her’) interpretation of these pieces. His (or her) technique had better be immaculate, but the control can never be total.

As my Lutosławski centenary odyssey comes to its close, I can reflect upon moral messages, as well as musical ones. This seems to me entirely fitting. Witold Lutosławski always protested that his music should be considered entirely separately from the almost invariably grim political situations that prevailed when it was being written, but it is my strongly-held view that we would be selling him short, were we not to highlight and prize his moral values and cast-iron personal integrity as well as his compositional techniques. For me and for so many others who knew him, the man and the music are inevitably and rightly an intertwined, inseparable and inspirational whole. Furthermore, for better or worse, music can never be wholly separated from politics, not least as metaphor. Lutosławski never abandoned his homeland during the dark times, but he also never sought to disguise his political beliefs, which were essentially those of an idealistic, high-minded and aristocratic liberal.

Lutosławski’s love of freedom declares itself radiantly in the music he began to write as soon as Stalin and his stooges were gone and he felt able to dare to express himself as he truly wanted. This helps to explain why orchestral musicians enjoy this music so much. They are part of a common effort, but they can express themselves too. The apotheosis of this wonderful creative paradox and tension is to be found in the Cello Concerto, premiered by Slava Rostropovich in 1970, less than a month before his struggles with the Soviet regime exploded into public warfare. In no other work that I know is the struggle between the individual and the collective so poignantly (or so violently) expressed.

Witold Lutosławski was born when Europe was on the cusp of the Great War. His family fled to Russia in the hope of finding sanctuary there, but the Bolsheviks murdered his father. As a young man, he escaped from the clutches of the Nazis, then watched, appalled, as the Germans destroyed his home city and then authoritarians of the left duly supplanted them as oppressors of the people. He of all people would have recognised that liberal values such as freedom of expression and respect for the individual are every bit as precious today, from Berlin to Manchester, from Warsaw to London, as they were in communist-controlled Eastern and Central Europe from the late 1940s to the late 1980s; and it is just as important as ever that we should cherish, nurture and protect those values, for, if we do not, we cannot be confident anyone else will. Perhaps that realisation – that resolution – would be the most potent and effective tribute to Witold Lutosławski in his centenary year and beyond it.