In Penthesilea, his 1908 setting of a text from a Polish play, the 26-year-old Szymanowski deploys a rich, Straussian style so effectively that associations are created with the kind of plush expansiveness that Schoenberg and Berg were exploring at much the same time. The short cantata Demeter from a decade later is even more impressive, occupying musical regions quite close to those of the opera King Roger, then in progress. After this, the Stabat mater (1924-26) indicates a distinct change of direction, the sacred text requiring a more ritualistic tone and a less exotic idiom. The rather laboured impression of the result is reinforced here in a recording which, while excellent musically, makes too much of the separation between the individual movements. More continuity is surely needed.

One is bound to wonder whether Symanowski’s heart was really in what sounds like a dutifully pious exercise. Such doubts are reinforced by the bombastic Veni Creator (1930), written for the composer’s installation as the first Rector of Warsaw’s State Academy of Music, and the Litany to the Virgin Mary (1933), gentler in tone but also fairly routine in its materials and methods. What is beyond question (those pauses in the Stabat mater apart) is the effectiveness of the performances, with a particularly fine soprano soloist in Iwona Hossa. No problems with the recordings, either.