This appears to be the second time on CD that David Alan Miller pairs John Harbison and the late Steven Stucky – composers who have little in common besides the ability to orchestrate with flair and confidence. Stucky’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Second Concerto makes most of its points through brilliant textural manipulation. The opening ‘Overture (with friends)’ features murmuring carpets of woodwind ostinatos that are punctuated by brass and percussion outbursts. Towards the end, playful brass polyphony gathers steam over sustained chords. The central Variations movement conveys more melodic direction, retaining much of the Overture’s chattering woodwind flourishes and rapid string-section work. The finale hovers between tonal and atonal and between rhythmic and amorphous, leaving Stucky’s boundless repertoire of dazzlingly generic orchestral effects to fend for themselves. While BIS’s recording with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra benefits from the authority of the composer’s supervision, I find Miller’s faster tempos and wider degrees of inflection more convincing.

Harbison’s five-movement Fourth Symphony has a lot more to say. Contrary to the annotator, I don’t perceive the opening Fanfare as bombastic but rather playful and unpredictably jazzy. By contrast, the Intermezzo presents a back-and-forth discourse between sections of the orchestra, characterised by strategic silences, long resonances and expansive string solos. At first the central Scherzo’s syncopations seem to have been appropriated from the Copland/Bernstein playbook, yet Harbison’s voice ultimately governs the music’s dry wit and lightness of being. The Threnody’s sense of melodic tension and release proves quite harrowing. If the finale’s opening section and concluding dance seem more conventionally symphonic and less inventive by comparison, an arresting passage featuring mallet percussion more than compensates. One cannot fault the sheen and precision that Ludovic Morlot and the Boston Symphony brought to their live 2011 recording, yet the nod goes to Miller’s faster and shapelier treatment of the Scherzo and more variegated string phrasing in the Threnody.

For all of the undeniable power and focused blend that the remarkable young National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic musicians bring to Carl Ruggles’s Sun-Treader, I prefer the closer, more vivid detailing, clearer linear strands and more assiduous transitions throughout the still sonically viable Tilson Thomas/Boston recording from the early 1970s. Still and all, this disc amounts to a major and highly recommendable achievement.