Louis Glass (1864-1936) was a close contemporary of his fellow countryman Carl Nielsen and, like the slightly better-known Rued Langgaard, he came to feel bitter that Nielsen’s growing reputation had eclipsed his own. Both he and Nielsen composed six symphonies but Glass was earlier off the starting blocks, so that his Third was composed in 1900-01, a full decade before Nielsen’s. This Forest Symphony comes with a more frankly descriptive programme than any Nielsen would have countenanced and its style is more complaisant, with more Bruckner and Franck in the mix and less Beethoven and Brahms. Occasionally, as at the very opening, it strikes gold and raises hopes of real distinction; parts of the second movement chime euphoniously with the more romantic passages of Nielsen’s comic opera Maskarade, composed five years later. More often, though, Glass hits baser metal, and his structures are relatively predictable, especially in their recycling of ideas from movement to movement. Even so, the orchestration is expertly tailored; and as an example of warm-hearted, serenade-like symphonism at the turn of the 20th century, Glass’s Forest Symphony makes for a pleasant excursion, especially in a performance as refined and imaginative as this one (which is to say, streets ahead of the rival Danacord version).

The five-movement suite Summer Life, here receiving its first recording, was probably composed just before the symphony. This is an equally undemanding makeweight, its frank descriptiveness occasionally shading into naive, here-we-go-round-the-maypole folksiness but never suggesting less than a competent craftsman and sympathetic spirit at work.