‘That’s the best piece of classical music you’ve played to me’, quipped my 10-year-old daughter on hearing Ruth Gipps’s Second Symphony. There is no room here to go into the extent of her musical frame of reference but suffice it to say it is exponentially broader than mine was at twice her age! As these four works show – three receiving premiere outings on disc – Gipps (1921 99) was a distinctive composer with something to say and the technique with which to say it. The single-movement Second Symphony (1945) is a good case in point, its eight sections bearing traces of the conventional four-movement format as well as an integrated set of variations.

The bedrock of Gipps’s style was Vaughan Williams, with whom she studied from 1937. Gordon Jacob, whom she would succeed upon his retirement, was her orchestration teacher and these works revel in expert scoring and quintessential Englishness. Yes, there are occasional resonances of Holst and Rawsthorne – even Lilburn (another VW student) in the Second’s Allegro moderato (track 11) – or Walton in Knight in Armour (1940), her musical calling card premiered at 1942’s Last Night of the Proms. Song for Orchestra (1948) is a miniature highlighting her own instrument, the oboe, but the main event is her superb Fourth Symphony (1972), a contemporary of Tippett’s Third, more orthodox in design but still one of the finest British symphonies of the decade.

Fine as Bostock’s Munich version was of the Second Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales outpoint it in every department. All their accounts here are wonderfully sensitive, the solo playing beautifully articulated, the structures perfectly brought out by Rumon Gamba. Perhaps this is indeed the best music I have played to my daughter.