After 1945, those expectations were harnessed to the Soviet agenda. Lutoslawski and Panufnik, friends who played four-hand piano at illegal cafés under the Nazi occupation (their Paganini Variations was the only score to survive the final conflagration), emerged unblinking into the Warsaw ruins to find commissars at their shoulder as they resumed composing. Both tried their best under severe constraints. In 1954 Lutoslawski presented a Concerto for Orchestra that was ostensibly a tribute to Bartók while subversively infiltrating forbidden dissonances. Panufnik, for his part, wrote a Homage to Chopin and a Rustic Symphony. He led a deputation to Mao's China before, weary of state interference, he defected to England and settled at Twickenham.

The main course of Polish music ran thereafter in two parallel streams. Panufnik, availing himself of every modernist device, wrote nine symphonies whose austere structures revealed a constant preoccupation with Poland — the Katyn massacre, the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, and more. Lutoslawski, politically inhibited, turned a 1960s thaw to advantage, assimilating the chance theories of John Cage in Venetian Games and the impressionistic serialism of Pierre Boulez in his second symphony, while filtering out popular songs through his sister-in-law, a cabaret artist. 

Polish music assumed two forms of exile, external in Panufnik's case, internal in Lutoslawski's. Officially they were unable to meet until Communism ended, though I heard from Andrzej that their dialogue continued throughout.

Panufnik died in 1991, Lutoslawski three years later. From the 1980s on, Lutoslawski's music earned a much wider audience through the advocacy of such global interpreters as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anne-Sophie Mutter. Concurrent recordings of Lutoslawski's music are appearing on Sony, conducted by Salonen rather loudly in Los Angeles, and on Chandos, where the lower-key approach of Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra sounds to my ear more closely attuned to the composer's shy, elusive, insistently courteous nature.

Panufnik's symphonies are appearing steadily on the CPO label, played with meticulous fidelity by one of the less-heralded Berlin orchestras and conducted quite intuitively by Lukasz Borowicz. This is a very good time to compare the two streams, side by side.