The booklet gives no birth date for John McLeod but the composer’s biography dives straight in with the impetus behind his music’s colour, exuberance and fantasy: studies with Lennox Berkeley and Witold Lutosławski. Here we have a percussion concerto, two single-movement orchestral works and the Hebridean Dances, all but one conducted by the composer.

This is my first taste of McLeod’s music but that doesn’t mean there aren’t familiar moments here. Out of the Silence pays homage to Carl Nielsen and The Shostakovich Connection to the Russian composer. There are canny stylistic references in each but the huge cut-and-paste quotes from those composers’ symphonies tend to undermine any sense of the homage being a subtle or truly responsive one.

They also add to the feeling that the works here are more interested in music history than they are in art, life, the world around us or even John McLeod. Just when the orchestral argument starts to freewheel with help from those disciplined, Lutosławski-imbued mechanics, the composer tends to stop short of delivering something to raise the music beyond the level of a refined study.

Nor does a tendency to fall back on generic, stock gestures help us make a distinction. In the Percussion Concerto – a form still finding its feet in 1987 – the novelty of the genre only exacerbates that problem (McLeod is far from alone here). But only to a point. We glimpse McLeod at his most bold and thrilling when the orchestra steps away for the soloist’s cadenzas and he addresses the array of solo instruments without the excess baggage of some orchestral or compositional tradition or other. And that, in summary, explains my frustrations with much of the music here, born of an evidently gifted craftsman who could tell us more about his own talent and outlook and less about other people’s.