The early orchestral works on this recording – the Winter Idyll (1897), Walt Whitman Overture (1899) and Cotswolds Symphony (1899-1900) – remind us of the substantial period Holst, like his confrère student and composer Vaughan Williams, took to develop his distinctive voice. Although Wagner is often cited as the most prominent influence on Holst as he emerged from the Royal College of Music at the turn of the century, Dvořák is much more evident in the youthful Winter Idyll and elements of the Czech’s Sixth Symphony seem to leap off the page of the Whitman Overture. As for the more ambitious Cotswolds Symphony, there are more signs of Holst’s later colourful orchestral technique in the energetic Scherzo, though the other movements, not least the ‘Elegy (In memoriam William Morris)’ – perhaps the composer’s most overt expression of his socialist allegiances – still powerfully betray their 19th-century roots.

Nevertheless, it is good to hear these works played with such panache by the Ulster Orchestra under their new principal conductor, JoAnn Falletta, who gives the Cotswolds Symphony a more vigorous outing than does Douglas Bostock with the Munich SO. The slightly later symphonic poem Indra, Op 13 (1903), though still stylistically inchoate, reveals a major step forwards in terms of the exotic material used to reflect the subject of the Indian legend. Even more exotic, however, is the much more characteristic Japanese Suite, Op 33 (1916), a fascinating precursor to The Planets. Infused with techniques and sounds that arose from sounds he drew from hearing Stravinsky for the first time, the work is beautifully performed here, most notably the delicate, crystalline sounds of celesta, harp, woodwind and horn.