This is the second time this year that Ludomir Różicki has featured in Gramophone – a composer highly regarded in his native Poland but otherwise little known. The reason for his inclusion was the new recordings of his two piano concertos, which I had the pleasure of welcoming in the February issue. These were played by Jonathan Plowright (overlooked yet again by the BBC Proms this year) and it is this outstanding British pianist in whose debt we are once more for this second Różicki resurrection. It is imaginatively coupled with another C minor piano quintet by a fellow Pole. A further agreeable link between the two works is that Friedman was the pianist in the second performance (1915) of the Różicki Quintet.

Różicki (1883-1953) wrote his work in Paris and Berlin in 1913 but there is no hint of the new music of Europe at that time, rather a throwback to Franck and Brahms working in the shadows of Richard Strauss and Max Reger. In the conventional three movements, awash with powerful themes and original ideas, it lasts a substantial 42 minutes. Who knows, it might even find a life outside the recording studio (which in this case, and not incidentally, was Potton Hall with engineer Ben Connellan and producer Jeremy Hayes, the team responsible for the Różicki concertos).

If anything, I like the Friedman even more. It was written in 1918, when he was already established as a world-class virtuoso. The piano part, however, is not a virtuoso vehicle, allowing the excellent Szymanowski Quartet to exploit to the full Friedman’s civilised five-way conversation. Try the first movement (Allegro maestoso) and its delicious second subject with more than just a hint of Der Rosenkavalier (Adrian Thomas in his excellent notes agrees that ‘in full orchestral garb it might have stepped off the page of a recent score by Richard Strauss’). The second movement (Larghetto, con somma espressione) is a theme and seven variations (the final one is a fugue); the ‘Epilog’ finale begins with a dance and ends quietly after recollections from the first two movements.

The disc’s cover has a wonderful painting by Wadysaw Podkowínski entitled Ecstasy. Very apt.