Early Lutosławski, his Paganini Variations, was included in the first night of the Proms four weeks ago. But in his concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Edward Gardner went back even further, opening with the Polish composer's earliest surviving orchestral score, the Symphonic Variations of 1938. It's an accomplished, pithy showpiece, packing lots of ideas – impressionist swirls, motor rhythms, a pawky march, jazzy fugato and triumphant chorale – into just nine minutes. With its touches of Roussel, Stravinsky and Bartók, it shows that, alongside the obvious home-grown influence of Szymanowski, Lutosławski was looking farther afield, too.
In the Piano Concerto he composed for Krystian Zimerman 40 years later, Ravel is added to the mix. The soloist here was Louis Lortie, who may not have Zimerman's phenomenal subtlety of touch and command of colour, but offered a wonderfully crystalline account of Lutosławski's piano writing, showing what the work owes to the great concerto tradition from Chopin to Bartók, as well as the very personal musical territory that it stakes out for itself.
Gardner expertly marshalled Lutosławski's teeming textures, and he paired the two works with Holst. The second half of his concert was devoted to a typically brisk, abrasive account of The Planets, in which no details were overlooked. Between the Variations and the Concerto he placed a beautifully restrained and delicately coloured unfolding of Egdon Heath, Holst's masterly late tone poem, which extraordinarily had not been heard at the Proms for a quarter of a century. It's one of Holst's greatest orchestral achievements, a bleak processional, a genuine precursor to Birtwistle's The Triumph of Time, that's both an evocation of the landscape of Thomas Hardy's Wessex as described in the opening chapter of The Return of the Native and a memorial to the writer himself, who died in the year which it was completed. Gardner seemed to relish its palette of greys and pastels, and judged it perfectly.
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