A long overdue collection of Zygmunt’s work from the late 1970s. This was Poland a decade before the political changes that transformed the East - but where the ideas of Cage and Cardew had found a natural home, and where the annual Warsaw Autumn festival was accepted everywhere as one of the world centres of new and experimental music, in all of which Zygmunt Krauze played an immensely important role. This CD collects his highly original Piano Concerto No.1, the exquisite, rustic-modern spatial work, Fete Galante et Pastorale, the quietly iconoclasticViolin Concerto and the polyglot Suite de Dances et Chansons - which mixes minimal, peasant and court aesthetics with strings, harpsichord and winds. It’s an amazing programme. Krauze has a unique compositional style, creating sounds that are hard to unravel, shimmering, exquisite, rich and somehow consonantly dissonant. His orchestrations are minimal and brilliant and his structures episodic and timeless. His is a music of an immediate and continuous present, without teleology; and the performances, as well as the thinking, are refreshingly un-academic: the violin concerto in particular is played more in roma/kletzmer style than any virtuoso classical soloist would be expected to produce. A remarkable body of work. L