The three pieces on this disc range across the majority of Henze’s mature career, from 1957 to 2005. Earliest is Nachtstücke und Arien, a vocal-and-orchestral diptych setting poems by Ingeborg Bachmann, perhaps the dearest of Henze’s early collaborators, framed and separated by three orchestral “night pieces”. Henze had written to Bachmann two years before about how he wished “to write the most beautiful contemporary music” and in this rapt score he took a huge step towards that aim. So much so, indeed, that it prompted Boulez, Nono and Stockhausen to stage a petulant walk-out at the premiere. Claudia Barainsky sings beautifully although Michaela Kaune just edges her in Wergo’s rival account; however, Markus Stenz – whose Henze pedigree is as distinguished as anyone’s (he is a former director of the Montepulciano Cantiere) – directs a tauter account than Ruzicka.

The Adagio, Fuge und Mänadentanz is the most recent item, premiered in 2005 but extracted from Henze’s finest opera, The Bassarids (1966). The opera was premiered under Christoph von Dohnányi who, 39 years later, requested this 25-minute suite and conducted its first performance. Drawn from the third of the opera’s four acts (or movements: it is constructed as a two-hour symphony in four movements), it forms a compellingly satisfying whole.

So too, though, does the major item here, the Eighth Symphony, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and premiered by them in 1993. Inspired by three scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Eighth is – like Beethoven’s and Vaughan Williams’s – something of a relaxation between the mightier edifices of the Seventh and Ninth but an utter delight from first bar to last. The Gürzenich Orchestra play with real inspiration under Stenz’s intelligent direction. Recommended.