Now here’s a find. Born in London in 1917 and a student of John Ireland at the Royal College of Music, Richard Arnell was still only 27 and living in New York when he completed the third of his six symphonies in August 1945. Dedicated ‘to the political courage of the British people’, it’s an enormously ambitious canvas, cast in six movements and clocking in at just over an hour, whose staggering reserves of energy, affirmative spirit and lack of inhibition should gain the composer many new admirers.

A BBC panel comprising Rubbra, Alwyn and Frankel read the score in 1950, and Norman Del Mar gave the world premiere in a broadcast with the BBC Northern Orchestra in 1952; Barbirolli then took up the symphony at the following year’s Cheltenham Festival but inflicted some hefty cuts (it’s played in its entirety here). There are echoes of Nielsen (try the second movement’s nobly flowing second subject from 0'58") and Shostakovich – and at times the music has something of the wide-screen rhetoric of the Harris, Copland, Diamond and Schuman symphonies from the same decade (a notable film composer, Arnell set up the music department of the London Film School and taught composition for many years at Trinity College of Music).

Inquisitive collectors can rest assured that Martin Yates and a geared-up RSNO give of their best. The disc also contains a red-blooded account of Arnell’s similarly irrepressible and communicative 1939 overture The New Age. Incidentally, I’ve heard good things about Arnell’s Fifth Symphony and hope a first commercial recording is in the pipeline to celebrate the composer’s 90th birthday next year.