Penderecki’s Symphony No. 6 ‘Chinese Songs’ is an intimate, chamber-scale work for bass-baritone and orchestra. It sets eight Chinese poems in German adaptations linked with interludes for the two-stringed erhu. It proved to be Penderecki’s last completed symphony and is imbued with great pathos as well as melodic beauty. The Trumpet Concertino is taut, spirited and full of dextrous interplay between the soloist and orchestra. His single-movement Concerto doppio for violin, cello and orchestra, is a work of keen unpredictability.

Nino Rota’s reputation outside Italy as, at best, a civilised purveyor of minor theatre music is turning out to be hardly even a half-truth. BIS’s series of his symphonic and chamber works, and Chandos’s of the concertos, reveals a composer of incisive gifts and technical brilliance. Civilised the music certainly is, but often far more than that, its pervasive wit enhancing rather than detracting from the elegant suggestions of deep feeling. The wise and wily ‘neo-classicism’ of the Third Symphony sets out like an exercise in updated Mozart, but though Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony is brought to mind it soon becomes evident that a strain of acid melancholy undercuts the dapper phraseology. The model here, if there is one, seems more likely to be late Busoni, with disturbing cross-currents just beneath the surface. The Concerto festivo, more obviously a display piece, takes Italian opera genres (aria, cabaletta, etc) and reinterprets them in fairly irreverent orchestral terms, while the ballet music that Rota produced for the tercentenary of the death of Molière – almost his last work –insouciantly mixes Baroque, modern and popular styles, just as it mixes merriment and melancholy, with constant technical brilliance and utter lack of pomposity. The Swedish performers take to the Italianate gaiety as to the manner born. A delightful disc.

This is the third and final volume of a series surveying the orchestral music of the doyen of Swedish composers, Ingvar Lidholm who was born in 1921. The music on this disc was composed between 1944-1958 and it illustrates the growth of the young composer into a mature artist with an instantly recognizable voice. Lidholm's years as a student of music coincided with World War II when Sweden, though neutral, was effectively shut off from the rest of Europe. This sense of isolation led many pioneering young people to look to the Continent for inspiration as soon as the war ended and boundaries opened again. Lidholm immersed himself in Continental avant-garde music by assiduously listening to the radio and in 1949 he became the first Swede to visit the summer courses for new music at Darmstadt. Very early on he became personally acquainted with such pioneering composers as Lutoslawski, Ligeti, Berio and Olivier Messiaen. Lidholm's early works reveal a subjective, Scandinavian romanticism, but the influence of Hindemith and Bartók soon becomes apparent, though always employed in a highly personal manner. The previous discs in the series were warmly reviewed: 'Excellent performances' This disc gets a strong recommendation' was the view of the International Record Review while Fono Forum gave the first disc a special recommendation for both performance and recording.