At its première 18 years ago, Henze’s Seventh Symphony was acclaimed as marking the resurgence of German symphonism. His Sixth Symphony (1969) had been a deliberate attack on that tradition (ironically, it now seems his most intrinsically symphonic work) – making the Seventh, written for and dedicated to the Berlin Philharmonic on its centenary, a conscious re-embracing of a hallowed genre.

The work was championed in the UK by Sir Simon Rattle, whose recording has had the field to itself for almost a decade. Here, Sylvain Cambreling is around a minute faster, the main difference being in the first movement – which, in contrast to Rattle’s remorseless accumulation of intensity, increases tension markedly at the mid-way point. The SWR orchestra is on generally excellent form – listen to the poise of the dialogue between oboe, cor anglais and harp at 4'21" into the second movement (after life’s ‘dance’, this is its passing) – though a lightness of bass rather flattens out the dynamic perspectives which Rattle so relishes in the third movement, thus bringing a trenchant clarity in even the densest textures that Cambreling’s suave irony fails to equal. Similarly, the Hölderlin-inspired finale lacks the older recording’s sense of desperate apotheosis.

Those interested in the Symphony should stick with Rattle, whose coupling is Barcarola (1979) – the aesthetic precursor of the Seventh and the most impressively unified of Henze’s descriptive orchestral works. Cambreling opts for the otherwise unavailable Ariosi (1963), an intriguing and poetic conflation of song-cycle and violin concerto. The Tasso verses, telling of remembered and lost love, link the piece directly to the Lieder tradition – though Henze’s use of the violin as the main melodic voice, with the soprano a ghostly presence which only assumes the foreground at the starkly funereal close, sets the expression at a post-Romantic remove. Christiane Oelze and Christian Ostertag complement each other in their purity of line and phrasing, while Cambreling’s moulding of emotional contours makes for an involving performance which is alone worth the price of the disc.