In The Black Tent (1956), filmed in Technicolor and VistaVision, the audience could be whisked from suburbia to a foreign location like Libya, where shooting took place. Alwyn’s score was typical of his cinematic craft. Eschewing the flamboyant approach of a Tiomkin, Alwyn devised music that portrayed events on screen in a pithy, no-nonsense fashion without resorting to cliché. In this Suite his cues, often carrying a dense narrative, proceed in a cogent fashion, as with the Nocturne and Finale, where the drama and romance of the desert are inspired by Arabic music.

Adventure films dominate this fourth CD of Alwyn’s music. The Master of Ballantrae (1953), from the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, is in a Scottish idiom, while Shake Hands With the Devil, a dramatic tale of the Black and Tans and the IRA, contains a little idyll for strings alone, ‘People of Erin’. A sombre, fully scored funeral march (‘Trouble’) rounds off this Suite. ‘The Mermaid’s Song’ from Miranda, a vocalise sung by the soprano Charlotte Trepass with full-bodied tone, provides an apt contrast, along with a Chopin-style Nocturne, played by pianist Paul James, in Alwyn’s They Flew Alone, a biopic of Amy Johnson. The sweeping Prelude from Saturday Island (1952) demonstrates again how the change from major to minor is such an effective musical device, while Fortune is a Woman is dominated by a three-bar motif at the start.

Philip Lane has once again reconstructed and arranged much of this music, with the notable exception of the ‘Manchester Suite’ from A City Speaks. In this instance Alwyn presented his five-movement score to the film-makers in advance of the production, directed by Philip Rotha and commissioned by Manchester City Council. It was conducted on the original soundtrack by Barbirolli with the Hallé Orchestra. Alwyn’s score illustrates Manchester’s citizens at work and at play. There’s an aspirational vision of a better life to come in the Alla marcia and a gritty determination to put it into practice in the Interlude. A fleeting Scherzo depicts their leisure activities.

The BBC Philharmonic under Rumon Gamba have a ball playing this music, no more so than in the dance cues from On Approval (1944), the film version of Frederick Lonsdale’s stage comedy, where the action was moved back from the 1920s to the 1890s. The film was described by director Lindsay Anderson as ‘the funniest light British comedy ever made’. A Waltz, Polka and a Lancers’ medley testify to Alwyn’s versatility on any cinematic subject. Artwork, picture stills, comprehensive music notes and a fine recording add their own allure to this significant addition to Alwyn’s cinematic output.