With the possible exceptions of Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921) and Louis Andriessen (b1939), 20th-century Dutch music remains a closed book for most music lovers. The output of the prolific, essentially self-taught Henk Badings (1907-87) carries the additional stigma of an uncertain war record. Accused of collaboration during the Nazi occupation when he was installed as head of The Hague’s rebranded Reichs-Musikkonservatorium, he was permitted to resume his career in 1947. His Seventh Symphony was commissioned by Robert Whitney and his Louisville orchestra in 1954 and, until new allegations surfaced and his reputation nosedived a second time, he achieved name recognition for his accessible electroacoustic experiments. No surprise then that it can be difficult to get a handle on such a creative personality. Only recently have his decently wrought, Hindemith-ish symphonies been heard again, courtesy of CPO’s ongoing series.

The present volume pairs the seemingly under-motivated Fourth (1943) with the tighter, more idiosyncratic Fifth, written in 1949 for the 60th anniversary of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The traditional formal aspect of these scores is plain – there are the classic four segments and Badings even prefaces his opening movements with slow introductions – but the presence of non-Western harmonic decoration and pockets of exotic scoring rescue the idiom from total anonymity. Ironically, the insistent march-like tread of the faster movements echoes such (implicitly or explicitly) anti-Nazi symphonies as Weill’s Second and Schulhoff’s Third.

The main material of the Fifth, springing from cryptic opening motifs as was Badings’s practice, is more distinctive, the main Allegro taking off as a sort of broken-backed tango. The slow movement strikes deeper than anything else and the terseness of the finale’s peroration comes as a surprise.

While orchestral sonorities can seem a little dry-throated in Bochum, any under-projected moments must be excused given the total unfamiliarity of these scores. I’m not sure what I was expecting of a composer born in Java when it was still a Dutch colony but be warned that the predominant colour is grey.