Witold Lutosławski's standing as one of the most important Polish composers of the twentieth century long seemed beyond reproach. The years following his death in 1994, however, saw a decline in performances and recordings of his work. Had his work, formed during wartime and communist Poland, lost some of its relevance for contemporary audiences? Lutosławski's almost total absence from Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music (2005), pointedly remarked upon by the editors of this volume, implicitly questioned his historical status: what of this composer's “world” and work remains important? This handsome volume, richly textured and of broad sweep, emphatically confirms the currency and vitality of Lutosławski's achievement.

The editors, scholars of well-established distinction in Polish music, have assembled an impressive cast of co-contributors from the UK, US, and Poland. The essays cover a diverse range, encompassing biography, critical theory, musical analysis, reception history, psychoanalysis, politics, and history. The collection is something like a mosaic: each essay provides a piece offering connections to others in the book and contributing to the creation of a new portrait of the composer. An introduction explains its origins in an AHRC-funded workshop. The benefits of this genuinely collaborative initiative are reaped in the consistent quality across the essays. Some are more heavyweight than others, but they all carry substance.

The book is organized in five sections: “Mourning, Modernism, and Genius”; “Other Lutosławskis”; “Documents”; “Political Engagement”; and “Legacies.” Muzyka żałobna (1958) is a focus for the opening two essays. Lisa Cooper Vest persuasively discusses constructions of “genius” in the Polish context and Lutosławski's ambivalent relationship with dodecaphony, driven by his distrust of the post-war serial hegemony and a concern for an “accommodation of the ear” through expressive content and clear formal process. Lutosławski resisted making connections between life and work, but Nicholas Reyland deploys analysis and hermeneutics to generate interpretations in which trauma theory and grief studies bring the tragic events of the composer's early life into relationship with musical material. Michael L. Klein's psychoanalytical study (moving between Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan) of the String Quartet (1964), gets beyond, or perhaps better, underneath Lutosławski's espoused formalism to reveal a play of complex subjectivity.

In “Other Lutosławskis” two essays look at the composer's work beyond the concert hall. Wioleta Muras considers music for theatre and radio as more than mere hack-work, as outlets for his imagination and technique. Lutosławski's unpublished “Theoretical Considerations” on music for radio drama, from the early 1950s, contains fascinating ideas on “realism,” characterization, and “punctuation marks,” a term inviting comparison with his concert music. This radio and theatre work diminished as the 50s drew to a close. In large part, as Danuta Gwizdalanka's essay relates, this was due to the commercial success of his alter ego “Derwid,” under which name he wrote a large number of popular songs (waltzes, tangos, and foxtrots) from 1957. As Gwizdalanka notes, these Derwid songs, long scorned by musicology, once again became prominent during the 2013 centenary celebrations (though this would hardly have delighted the composer). Lutosławski's work as a café pianist in occupied Warsaw is much more widely known, but Katarzyna Naliwajek-Mazurek offers fresh detail and nuance on this activity by drawing rich pickings from a revelatory interview given by the composer in 1980, until now unavailable in English. To these two essays, Iwona Lindstedt's analytical study of “sonorism” (a defining feature of the Polish avant-garde) seems an unlikely companion. But her approach to Lutosławski's music of the 1960s via the theoretical work of Józef Chomiński allows a rethinking of a concept, until now considered broadly antithetical to the composer's aims (which I suppose is where the “Otherness” resides).

Lutosławski's private documents accrue high value because of his public reticence. Stanisław Będkowski describes materials now in the Paul Sacher Foundation in which the composer opined on the work of his contemporaries, a resource which needs future research. Zbigniew Skowron scrutinizes the “Notebook of Ideas” (1958–84), which moves from compositional sketches into wider considerations of twentieth-century musical modernism. As with Cooper Vest's opening essay, Lutosławski's complicated relationship with twelve-tone music is richly illuminated. The most important aspects of Adrian Thomas's discovery in 2002 of a file (1948–54) which Lutosławski labelled “Folk Materials,” are those relating to the Concerto for Orchestra, the folk basis of which has long been a subject of debate.

The Concerto for Orchestra also informs David G. Tompkins's probing of Lutosławski's relationship with socialist realism, which moved from the initially supportive to increasing frustration, an attitudinal shift in which he was far from alone. In a later political context, Andrea F. Bohlman's analysis of Lutosławski's public reticence, his insistent separation of life and work, and his positioning with regard to Solidarity in the 1980s, allows a critical reading against the trope of the heroic or dissident artist. And two of the composer's firmly held convictions (formal autonomy, and the divide between “art” and “popular” music) are reassessed in Lisa Jakelski's discussion of features of the 2013 centenary; a controversially emotive performance of the Piano Concerto by Krystian Zimerman and a boundary-busting event in which Lutosławski's music was reworked with electronic dance materials.

The book is dedicated the memory of Steven Stucky, whose 1981 monograph was a pioneering English-language study of the composer. Reyland has edited a contribution which was left incomplete on Stucky's death. Presenting a characteristically rich analysis of the Fourth Symphony, the essay provides a poignant and provocative final flourish for the volume. The editors are to be congratulated on ensuring consistent quality of style and argument across an international field of authors. Generously illustrated by musical examples and figures, with footnotes instead of tiresomely placed endnotes, this book will help guarantee that, in spite of his scandalous disappearance in Taruskin's Oxford History, Lutosławski himself will not be consigned as a footnote to musical history.