Initiated years ago by the late Richard Hickox and continued splendidly with Vol 3 by Andrew Davis (12/13), this latest instalment in the series of Holst’s complete orchestral works is an interesting collection of pieces from across his career. Beautifully performed by the BBC Philharmonic, Holst’s brilliant orchestral technique and imagination are expertly finessed by Davis who has, beyond any shadow of doubt, stepped into the shoes of Boult, Barbirolli, Handley, Braithwaite, Thomson and Hickox as a true champion of British music of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Listening to A Winter Idyll (1897), the Cotswolds Symphony (1899-1900) and Indra (1903), one is reminded of the fact that Holst, like Vaughan Williams, was a slow developer and that the hand of Romanticism, across a broad European spectrum, remained a potent feature of his music until just before the First World War.

A Winter Idyll gives us a taste of Holst the student still studying under Stanford. Accomplished in form and clear instrumentation, it reveals the 23-year-old composer’s susceptibilities to the current popularity of Dvořák, Tchaikovsky and Grieg. Late 19th-century influences are still significant features of the Cotswolds Symphony, Op 8 (though there are many indications of an emerging personality in the ‘Elegy in memoriam William Morris’ and the gossamer Scherzo), but while the Sanskrit-inspired symphonic poem Indra, Op 13, may still betray Holst’s indebtedness to Wagner, there is much in this work that shows a new harmonic and technical boldness. The Invocation, Op 19 No 2 (1911), sensitively interpreted by Guy Johnston, belongs to that fascinating set of works including The Cloud Messenger (1910 12), the suite Beni Mora (1912) and the St Paul’s Suite (1912 13) where, in response to early 20th-century modernism, the chemistry and vision of Holst’s style and language were undergoing significant change.

It is a treat, too, to hear the string orchestration of A Moorside Suite (1928, in Colin Matthews’s edition of 1994) which Holst intended for the girls at St Paul’s, Hammersmith, which, I have to say, I prefer for all its clarity, crispness, sonority and timbre to the brass version. Proving too difficult for them, however, he composed the delightful Brook Green Suite in its place. The remaining work on this recording is the lean, neoclassical Scherzo (1933) Holst completed for a symphony he had been planning from 1932. Bearing all the hallmarks of that sinewy contrapuntal austerity of Holst’s last works – such as Egdon Heath (1928), the Choral Fantasia (1930) and Hammersmith (1930 31) – it belongs to that more severe asceticism touched on in ‘Saturn’ and ‘Neptune’, and which Vaughan Williams was exploring in Job (1930) and his Fourth Symphony (1930 34).