Richard Rodgers liked to tell a story about a Broadway arranger who insisted that he was at least 50 per cent responsible for the success of a show. Rodgers threw him a sheet of blank manuscript paper. ‘Go on then – arrange me a hit.’ If we think of Robert Russell Bennett at all, it’s probably as an arranger (albeit a hugely influential one) rather than as a composer in his own right. But, whatever else this new collection of his music for wind band proves, it’s that Bennett, for one, never had to be afraid of a blank page.

Chandos has done him proud. The Royal Northern College of Music Wind Orchestra is a professional-level outfit, and in Mark Heron and Clark Rundell they’ve got two of the world’s foremost conductors in this field. These are bright-eyed, upfront performances, alert to Bennett’s kaleidoscopic sense of instrumental colour, and delivered with energy and an enjoyable hint of swing. If you don’t get quite the same wall-of-sound punch that Frederick Fennell used to deliver in this repertoire, Chandos’s warm and clear recorded sound is unquestionably more pleasant on the ear.

As for the music: well, it’s real peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwich stuff, at its wittiest in the Midwestern nostalgia of Bennett’s seven-movement Autobiography, at its most expansive in the NBC documentary score (complete with startlingly realistic foghorn) Down to the Sea in Ships, and at its most uninhibitedly tuneful in the Old American Dances. As a melodist Bennett is no Rodgers or Gershwin, but he’s got charm to spare and it bubbles over on this disc. This is a regular Thanksgiving feast of mid-century Americana; it should give a lot of pleasure.