Symphony No. 1 [1.Symfonia] (1947)

The BBCSO rounded off their Polish night with Lutosławski’s First Symphony. It kicks off as an uplifting firecracker whose daring, wit and verve allowed the ever-energetic Nesterowicz to showcase the taut, bright and finely articulated playing of the BBCSO. After a harrowing war (he survived as a Warsaw café pianist), Lutosławski premiered the piece in 1948, only to have Poland’s blockheaded artistic Stalinists suppress it for alleged “formalism”. These days, however, the brisk and witty neo-classical allegro sounds like a real crowd-pleaser. Think Stravinsky or even Prokofiev at their bounciest – or even, as jazzy trumpet and flute dance skittishly over lush swooning strings, Bernstein far across the ocean.

Brooding, keening cellos anchor a slow movement that then sets haunted wood and brass off to explore a post-traumatic age of anxiety. This shadowed, spooky quality deepens into an “allegretto misterioso”, the conflictual fragments of a macabre waltz only half-resolved by otherworldly brass. If the dotted rhythmic hubbub of the finale let the BBC players say farewell in scintillating style, all this upbeat bustle still had a manic, even panic-stricken, air. This vibrant, committed account of a deeply expressive piece reminded me that Lutosławski deserves a much higher profile in Britain’s concert mainstream. That, alone, made this non-chauvinistic tour of musical Poland a cause for celebration.

The evening ended in an all too infrequent revival of Lutosławski's First Symphony (1947), a work whose protracted gestation across the Second World War is balanced by that innate classicism which informs even the most radical of his later works. If the Third of Roussel's Symphonies was its likely starting-point, the ingenuity by which Lutosławski modifies the sonata format in the outer Allegros, along with the finely wrought eloquence of its slow movement, then interplay of the ironic and ominous in its intermezzo, already proclaim a composer in full command of his resources.