With this third disc the BBC Philharmonic complete a fine survey of Karlowicz’s orchestral music (excepting the Violin Concerto, recorded by Hyperion). Now we can finally salute and consign to the library shelves the worthy but provincial pioneering efforts of the Silesian PO (Dux, 3/04) and enjoy this music in all its rich, velvet-draped luxury.

This instalment is, admittedly, something of a mopping-up exercise, the best of Karlowicz’s output being found on the first of the BBC Philharmonic’s discs (Chandos, 10/02). The Nietzschean pessimism of Returning Waves and A Sorrowful Tale relates strongly to the Richard Strauss of Tod und Verklärung pretensions, albeit without the transfiguration. Here the music sounds as though it has overdosed on Wagner and turned to César Franck for the antidote, compounding rather than solving its problems in finding an individual voice.

In Episode at a Masquerade – completed by Grzegorz Fitelberg following the composer’s tragically early death in a skiing accident – there are attractive, though passing and presumably coincidental, affinities with the Elgar of Cockaigne. Here, too, the overall atmosphere is far removed from the frivolity that the title (and indeed the opening pages of the score) might suggest.

The BBC Philharmonic’s dynamic principal conductor, Gianandrea Noseda, took the reins from Yan Pascal Tortelier after their first Karlowicz disc. He has a sure instinct for the music’s indulgent textures and melodramatic effusiveness, and orchestral playing and recording are both of the highest class. Self-recommending, then, to explorers of late-Romantic byways.