Szymanowski: Violin Concerto No 1; Symphony No 3, Song of the Night

This marks Pierre Boulez's first foray into Szymanowski's music on disc, though his fascination with the Polish composer's work apparently goes back more than half a century. In an interview on a bonus disc, he discusses the reasons for his attraction: Szymanowski's music embodies a liberated attitude towards chromatic harmony, which he perceives as acting as a radical counter to the strictures of the major system builders, Schoenberg and Hindemith. Both the first violin concerto and third symphony were completed in 1916 and express a mystic-sensualist worldview derived, in part, from Sufi poetry. In each work a soloist "in the symphony a tenor, singing a setting of a poem by Rumi about the soul's nocturnal colloquy with God" maintains an ecstatic, free-flowing melodic line against a kaleidoscope of orchestral colour. Boulez makes a strong case for the symphony, and is particularly persuasive in the second movement. The concerto is cooler. Frank Peter Zimmermann's darker, more emotive Sony recording with the Warsaw Philharmonic remains the benchmark performance.