Marco Polo’s sets of Edward German’s orchestral music (6/93, 11/95, 1/96) were welcome and now comes this generously filled CD. The material – none of it duplicated from the earlier sets – is perhaps generally less striking but all is warmly romantic and beautifully crafted music of real grace and refinement.

Two items derive from German’s theatre commissions of the 1890s – the Overture to The Tempter and the Romeo and Juliet Prelude, which contains an especially beautiful love theme for strings. The longest single movement is the Hamlet symphonic poem, written for the 1897 Birmingham Festival and further demonstrating German’s command of orchestral resources, if inviting questionable comparisons with Tchaikovsky’s tone-poem of a few years earlier. The Willow Song was German’s last work of any significance – a heartfelt outpouring for the Royal Academy of Music’s centenary in 1922 but one that, at less than eight minutes, suggests a composer by then somewhat worked out.

There are echoes of Tchaikovsky, too, as well as Dvorák and Parry in perhaps the major attraction here – the First Symphony, performed at the Crystal Palace in 1890 and never published for orchestra. Again it is full of arresting ideas and eminently tuneful, if never quite becoming an arresting entity.

John Wilson has hitherto been featured on CD in generally lighter fare but here he demonstrates an impressive feel for constructing larger forms. The result is a beautifully played and recorded CD that further fills out our knowledge of Britain’s symphonic output before Elgar.