When Grace Williams went to Caernarfon in 1969 to hear her contribution to the investiture of the Prince of Wales performed at the Castle, she stayed with her friend and younger composer-colleague Dilys Elwyn-Edwards. Owing to some confusion in the rehearsal schedule she returned to find nobody at home and was thus forced to break in through a very conspicuous side-window and enter the property rather gingerly by stepping over a precious Grotrian-Steinweg grand piano. She apparently revelled in this tale just as much as in the success of her Castell Caernarfon at the ceremony itself. The first commercial recording of this impressively festive and ritualistic score forms the centrepiece of this new disc and makes a suitably sumptuous impression in splendidly resonant sound.

The current revival of interest in Grace Williams’s music is all the more welcome in that following her death in 1977 her output was largely ignored outside her native Wales. Within Wales, however, she was always a beloved figure and her most popular works were never forgotten. Her 1940 Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, heard at this year’s Last Night of the Proms, was given its first performance in 1941 by the BBC Northern Orchestra – forerunner of today’s BBC Philharmonic as conducted here by John Andrews. In 1943 they also premiered the revised version of Four Illustrations for the Legend of Rhiannon, composed and first heard in 1939. Pre-echoes of the Fantasia provide fascinating confirmation of the composer’s very individual musical voice as well as the scope of her ambition, together with further evidence of her predilection for a favourite brass instrument: not for nothing did she become known to orchestral wags as ‘Williams the Trumpet’.

These first recordings make this an essential release for lovers of Welsh music and the vivid sound quality now afforded the pungent Ballads for Orchestra of 1968 reveals all manner of orchestral detail missing from Vernon Handley’s BBC Welsh version made in the boxy old 1960s studio in Llandaff (recently demolished). The same cannot be said, though, of the popular Sea Sketches for strings, completed in 1944 and suggesting so evocatively a wartime nostalgia for the Glamorgan coastline of her childhood. David Atherton’s ECO recording of 1970 still sounds magnificently vivid and he brings the music to life with just that extra frisson of character and grip. The two Lyrita discs of Grace Williams’s orchestral music remain invaluable – but at the same time this Resonus collection is an important and welcome addition to the catalogue.