Philip Sawyers’ standing as one of the most compelling symphonic composers to emerge in recent years owes much to the determined advocacy of conductor Kenneth Woods. The pair reunite here for first recordings of the Fourth Symphony and the symphonic poem Hommage to Kandinsky.

Completed in 2018, the Symphony is a thrilling exercise in orchestral colour cast in three tightly integrated movements. Witness the imposing, and not a little intimidating, opening statement where rumbling stabs of stentorian brass force their way through the stygian gloom of bass drum and timpani into the glimmering twilight of high woodwinds and low strings. It’s a short-lived release, the movement inching its way through an uneasily shifting landscape of dramatic peaks and troughs in search of a resolution that seems forever tantalisingly out of reach. Echoes of Bruckner at his most dramatically portentous, of Vaughan Williams at his most lyrically intense, are apt indicators of Sawyers’ richly executed language, taut, tense and threaded together with aching poetry.

Lit up by remarkable details in every section of the orchestra, the concentrated middle movement is as fleet as it is dense. The resulting tension creates a visceral rollercoaster ride...