There’s a certain formulaic quality to Panufnik’s music, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you enjoy the formula. Static episodes often featuring high-lying strings alternate with ferocious, toccata-like textures and percussive outbursts. Most of these pieces end quietly. The early works remain tonal for the most part, while the level of dissonance is much higher later on. This disc offers a particularly valuable opportunity to hear the evolution in Panufnik’s harmonic idiom within the above-listed parameters.
As with the other discs in this series, the performances are very well played, 100 percent committed, and opulently engineered. Conductor Lukasz Borowicz paces each piece excellently, particularly in the slower music, finding the right feeling of stasis without lapsing into total immobility. Only the presto section in the Tenth symphony could, it seems to me, move a bit more quickly, but this is a very small point (it’s only a couple of minutes of music in total). As I said at the start of this review, if you like the formula, you’ll enjoy following Panufnik on his personal journey.
