Good news: Vol 3 in Chandos’s Casella series effortlessly maintains the exalted artistic and technical standards of both its predecessors (8/10, 8/12). Proceedings are launched in exhilarating fashion by the fervently patriotic 1910 symphonic rhapsody Italia, whose markedly downbeat, even anguished progress (employing folk tunes from Sicily) leads ultimately to a riotous Neapolitan carnival in which Casella – even more than Strauss does in the finale of his Aus Italien – has a ball with Luigi Denza’s ‘Funiculì funiculà’; the gloriously over-the-top concluding pages have to be heard to be believed!

The Introduzione, Corale e Marcia is entirely different again, a finely chiselled, sparkily inventive triptych from 1935, scored for wind, brass, percussion, piano and double basses, in which Casella doffs his hat to Stravinsky. The Russian master’s influence can also be felt in the large-scale, sinewy Third Symphony that Casella wrote in 1940 for Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony’s golden jubilee, though here the music’s neo-classicism (with its additional echoes of Busoni, Hindemith, Honegger and Milhaud) acquires a conspicuously Mahlerian flavour in the nervy scherzo and C major rondo finale especially (the latter owes much to its counterpart in the Seventh Symphony). This is a substantial, meatily argued and consummately crafted work which well repays closer scrutiny.

Gianandrea Noseda encourages the BBC Philharmonic to give of their considerable best throughout (the exuberant yet marvellously controlled orchestral playing towards the close of Italia really does raise the roof). The Chandos sound, too, is demonstration-worthy in its sumptuous realism and intrepidly wide dynamic range. A very strong recommendation.