An extensive analytical note occupies some 20 pages of the booklet which comes with this disc. While one would have thought it pretty well exhaustive, of the myriad influences it lists – Bruckner, Mahler, Debussy and Ravel, to name but four – it misses what to me is the most obvious, Joseph Jongen. There’s something about the bittersweet harmonic language and the driving rhythms, not to mention the punchy dialogue between organ and orchestra, most vivid in the super-charged hunting music which opens the second movement, which brings the Belgian’s Sinfonia concertante very much to mind.

That said, even though it was composed as his graduation submission from the Prague Academy of Performing Arts in 1954, it has many of the hallmarks of Eben’s mature style. In its extraordinary length, it might seem to suggest youthful excess, and this might also explain why the work has generally slipped under the radar. But, while the language is certainly fresh-faced and unashamedly colourful – making highly effective use of the orchestral resources, especially the horns, almost more than of the organ – this is a very assured work, and perhaps it just needs a good performance on disc to bring it to wider attention.

And this is a very good performance. Not as spectacular as one imagines it could be given a more lavish acoustic or a more flamboyant organist (Gunther Rost’s scales in the closing stages of the second movement do sound awfully tame), but one which gives an uncluttered and wholly unpretentious view of a work which most hearing this disc will be encountering for the first time. The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra under Gabriel Feltz are neat and dovetail nicely into Rost’s measured virtuosity, and while one wishes the third movement could have a little more intensity from the strings, there’s more than enough here not just to whet the appetite but to make this a performance well worth hearing in its own right.