The huge crescendo eventually quiets down and departs in a world that shimmers, sings, dances, and buzzes with delicate textures that enjoy Spanish rhythms and Ravel’s and Bartok’s pungent harmonic syntax. An aggressive keyboard cadenza ushers in heroically inflamed fanfares that end the movement. The Andante unites the piano, flute and violin in a gentle serenade, an evocation of rivulets, as the tympani quietly thunders in the background. Bartok’s night music seems nigh, maybe one of Stravinsky‘s neo-Baroque scores. Wit and Broja raise the level of intensity…

Symphony No. 1 also bears the influence of Strauss, but this time Szymanowski’s own personality and nervous energy take over, and like his 2nd Symphony previously reviewed on this site, exhibits a keen sense of structure and development. Imagine if you may Richard Strauss living an extra 20 years. He himself would probably have sounded exactly like this.

Symphony No. 4 is a ‘Symphonie Concertante’, with a piano being the prominent instrument. By this time in his creative life, this music is all Szymanowki. Much more infused with mystery and adventurous harmonic twists, but still very formal in structure and form. Emotion and logic all rolled into one.

As with the previous release of Symphonies 2 and 3 [8.570721], Antoni Wit lives this music and releases every ounce of energy out of every note in the score. The Naxos recordings produced in Warsaw are excellent in every way, resulting in a full-bodied and three dimensional soundscape. Well done!

The early Concert Overture, son of Rosenkavalier and proud of it, is resplendently played here, only at rare moments craving a more glamorous sound stage. And the over-heated two-movement First Symphony, which the composer himself described as a “contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral monstrosity” and withdrew after its premiere, emerges as far more purposeful and less rebarbative than I can remember from any of the admittedly few rival versions that have come and gone over the years.

As a listening experience the Fourth Symphony is initially somewhat more problematic, in that the opening pages (surely the model for Bartok’s Third Piano Concerto) suffer from slight intonation problems between the concertante piano and the orchestra. But with a bit of acclimatisation, helped by the firm and affectionate shaping of the performance, this proves to be liveable with. Jan Krzysztof Broda seems to grow in stature through the rhapsodic slow movement, and he never loses the thread in the finale’s Raveian and Prokofievian deviations.

All in all, it would take significantly greater financial outlay to find anything better than this, and even then the differences would be marginal.

So, how do you out-Strauss Strauss? Well, Szymanowski does it rather well with the rampant brass and thrilling amplitude of his Concert Overture. In a blind test I wonder how many people would think they were listening to Don Juan? Yes, the piece may be derivative but it’s much more than just a pale imitation. Szymanowski certainly captures the excitement of a large orchestra in full spate, Wit working the sluice gates for all he’s worth. Ideally the sound could be broader and go deeper but I was quiet content to be swept along by the Straussian flood. A cracking piece and a fine start to this disc.

The First Symphony is built on the same generous lines as the overture—the opening of the first movement is a mix of Wagner and Strauss—but underneath those harmonies one might discern something more unyielding. It seems the composer was becoming less enchanted with—and by—late German Romanticism, so perhaps it’s not surprising that under those surging climaxes there are tougher rhythms at work; sample the passage in the first movement that begins at 5:38, for instance.

Beneath the tumult of the second movement are the usual Straussian tunes, but what really impresses here is Wit’s unerring pace and sense of structure, both of which make the symphony ‘hang together’ most convincingly…This is a work that cries out for a full-bodied recording, preferably on SACD, but the only other version I can find in the catalogue is another Naxos release, also from Poland (8.553683).

As for the Fourth Symphony it inhabits a different sound world entirely—listen to the timp strokes and spiky piano tune at the start of the first movement. There are the same eruptive passages, which alternate with writing of unexpected inwardness and lyricism. The pianist, Jan Krzysztof Broja, is well placed and recorded, and the engineers have done a splendid job capturing the work’s more unusual sonorities; just sample the strange, twilight passage that begins at 5:58. I did feel the sound lacked weight in the overture but it’s more than acceptable here, with plenty of breadth and depth.

The recording is just as impressive in the quiet, almost imperceptible, opening to the second movement. This is music of rare tranquillity, underpinned by the gentlest of pulses; that said, the piano ushers in a more assertive central section that builds to a broad, well-proportioned climax (no empty rhetorical flourishes here). In the music that follows the flute and piano are particularly alluring, the latter signing off with a short downward phrase that takes us straight into the martial Allegro. These are the insistent rhythms and rougher textures we hear in Harnasie, for instance, a world away from the overstuffed music of Strauss and Wagner. Surely this is much closer in sound—and spirit—to Prokofiev, especially in those glittering piano figures and orchestral gallop to the finish.

The Study in B flat minor inhabits another world again. Orchestrated by the Polish conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg (1879–1953) it’s a wisp of a thing, light, airy and most sensitively played by the Warsaw band. It’s a perfect coda to a rewarding programme and proof, if it were needed, that Maestro Wit and his orchestra are setting new standards in this repertoire.

A splendid addition to what is now an indispensable cycle.

Szymanowski himself came to repudiate Symphony No. 1 in F Minor of 1907 as being “too Wagnerian,” though the influence of Richard Strauss may be more evident to the modern listener. To be sure, it is a taut, exuberantly scored work in two movements, orgiastic and virtuosic in character, that could hardly be bearable if it were any longer in duration (18:40 in the present recording). Wit and the orchestra do it full justice, as they also do Szymanowski’s similarly explosive Concert Overture in E Major of 1905.

As many another young composer has discovered, you can’t very well play tennis without a net. Thus Szymanowski came to make his peace with sonata-form long before the time of his Symphony No. 4, Op. 60 of 1932. While the results are noticeably more satisfying than in his First Symphony in terms of harmonic resolution and a sense of purpose and direction toward which the composer was building, he lost none of the essential beauty he strived for in his luminously scored music. The Fourth is sometimes described as a “Symphonie Concertante” because of the great latitude given to the piano and violin solos, performed here by Jan Krzysztof Brola, piano; and Ewa Marczyk, violin. Broadly stated melodies with a certain Polish flavor make this work memorable. Antoni Wit does a superb job building the climaxes in a work requiring clarity as well as power from the interpreter, and the sound engineering allows him plenty of room to maneuver.

We finish with Szymanowski’s Piano Study in B-flat Minor, Op. 4, No. 3, in the orchestration by his contemporary, Grzegorz Fitelberg. Melodic as well as poignant, it makes for a fitting conclusion to the program.