Michael Collins’s second recording of Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto (Chandos, 1/13), where he also directed the BBC Symphony Orchestra, came out top in my Gramophone Collection four years ago (6/16), ‘a rhapsodic, poetic interpretation’, I concluded. His earlier recording, with the City of London Sinfonia under Richard Hickox (Virgin, 8/88), is still unavailable but Collins has just recorded the concerto for a third time. With his Chandos account still sounding stunning, it rather prompts the question: why?

I guess you could respond: why not? This time, the recording is for BIS (Collins’s label debut) and he conducts the Philharmonia, the orchestra with which he played principal clarinet for much of his early career in the 1980s. Collins’s ripe tone is very much undiminished and he shapes Finzi’s winding melodies as affectionately as ever. The BIS recording has more heft to it than its Chandos counterpart; recorded last July at the Watford Colosseum, the strings are in closer focus, revealing slightly more detail. As an interpretation, Collins’s view hasn’t altered much. He is slightly more relaxed in the outer movements here, although the Allegro vigoroso strings very much live up to their billing in the score.

The one caveat I offered about Collins’s Chandos recording was that the slow pace of the Adagio (12'27") ‘may not suit all tastes’. Here he is closer to Finzi’s suggested metronome marking of crotchet=50, even allowing for the composer’s ma senza rigore (11'56"). There’s a feeling of pastoral ease without ever getting stuck in a ‘cow staring over the fence’ rut, encouraging such impassioned string-playing that the movement’s emotional climax registers strongly.

Finzi’s really is a very fine clarinet concerto. Stephen Johnson’s booklet note describes how the composer ‘seems to have penetrated to the soul of the instrument’ and as long as Collins performs it, the work will find new admirers. Should you pick this newcomer above his Chandos recording? That could depend on your response to the slow-movement tempo (try and sample both discs), but also on the coupling. For Chandos it was joined by clarinet concertos by Stanford and Arnold, whereas for BIS, Collins makes his debut recording as a symphonic conductor, pairing the Finzi with another pastoral creation premiered six years earlier, Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony.

Collins has a natural feel for the work’s structure and draws glowing playing from the Philharmonia. The Scherzo has lovely woodwind accents and the cor anglais solo that opens the Romanza (presumably Jill Crowther but there is no list of players in the booklet) is suitably gold-spun. The last new recording of the Fifth I heard was Andrew Manze’s excellent account with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Manze takes tauter control over the outer movements – the drive in the first movement is thrilling – but Collins builds up a good head of steam in the Passacaglia, the Philharmonia brass in blazing form. I’d be keen to hear more from Collins the conductor, as long as there are no plans to abandon the clarinet just yet, please.