Even if you invested in Warner’s boxed Myaskovsky edition, a surprise Award-winner last year, there are grounds for exploring these parallel individual releases from Alto. The masters are those intended for release on the Olympia label and both the design concept and the detailed annotations keep faith with the original project. Volume 16 should have special appeal to Myaskovsky enthusiasts looking to “place” three imperfect but intriguing works. Silence (1910) is student Myaskovsky, which means that it may be familiar from the Prokofiev literature even if its Poe-inspired content, replete with gloomy fin de siècle chromaticism, has remained an unknown quantity.

The vaguely neo-classical Sinfonietta in B minor dates from the end of the 1920s, just when Soviet music was being hijacked by a proletarian faction whose reductive aesthetic had eventually to be curbed through tighter state control. Myaskovsky’s response was to write less and retreat into a never-never land of heightened civility and grace. That said, the slow movement emerges here as a bigger, more profound utterance than in the rival Samoilov account (Regis, 3/07), Prokofiev’s influence readily apparent in the haunting textures at its core. Svetlanov can seem at once ultra-sensitive and curiously heavy-handed; rehearsal time plainly wasn’t generous and there is some dodgy tuning too.

The 19th-century idiom of the Divertissement (1948) is blander in response to renewed statesponsored cultural repressions. Devotees may yet discern a vein of poignancy likely to be missed by more casual listeners.