The work was commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society with support from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
It received its world premiere at the Royal Festival Hall on October 14, 1970 by the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (to whom the piece is dedicated) and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Edward Downes.
The music critic Andrew Clements of The Guardian called it "one of the Polish composer's greatest achievements".
[3] The writer Michael McManus similarly wrote, "I have always had a special affection for Witold Lutosławski's Cello Concerto.
Intriguingly, it also strikes me as sitting to some degree outside the mainstream of his otherwise clear compositional phases, emanating from his most avant-garde period but somehow not fully belonging to it.