Here’s yet another enticing helping of Alwyn courtesy of David Lloyd-Jones, Naxos and the William Alwyn Foundation (administered by the tireless Andrew Knowles). Of the seven works on this latest collection, the earliest, the Five Preludes from 1927, receives a first recording. Premiered by Sir Henry Wood at a Queen’s Hall Prom that year, these colourful and varied miniatures constitute an extremely likeable sequence, the lullaby of No 4 tapping a vein of wistful lyricism not far removed from that espoused by John Ireland. Wood was also due to conduct the first performance of the fizzing Overture to a Masque (1940) but the London Blitz put paid to that and the manuscript only came to light 50 years later, buried deep in the LSO’s archives.

The pensive Pastoral Fantasia (1939) for viola and strings was another work which gathered dust for over half a century – and that despite an auspicious debut entrusted to Watson Forbes and the BBC SO under Sir Adrian Boult. Philip Dukes makes the most of Alwyn’s grateful solo writing, while the RLPO’s principal cor anglais Rachael Pankhurst is on no less eloquent form in the dusky Autumn Legend from 1954 (with its haunting echoes of Debussy’s “Nuages” and Sibelius’s “The Swan of Tuonela”). Be it in the invigoratingly clean-cut dialogue of the 1943 Concerto grosso No 1 (inscribed to Alwyn’s friends and colleagues in the LSO, in which he played flute), imploring heartache of the Tragic Interlude (1936) or jaunty skip of the Suite of Scottish Dances (1946), Lloyd-Jones and the RLPO serve all this material handsomely. The sound has ample presence but is inclined to harden just a smidgen whenever the decibels increase (string-tone, too, might be kinder). Alwynites needn’t hold back.