Reflections ‘on memory, loss and healing’ by composers ‘with strong links to Scotland’ – which perhaps explains the involvement of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (on fine form, too) – are the connecting threads here. In truth, the links are tenuous, though Anna Clyne’s touching (very touching) elegy for 15 strings on the death of her mother, Within Her Arms (2019), shares an obvious link with James MacMillan’s For Zoe (2014), composed in memory of Zoe Kitson, principal cor anglais of the RSNO, who had died that year. Henry Clay, current cor anglais of the orchestra but who seems not to merit a biographical note (unlike flautist Katherine Bryan in the title-track), plays it very nicely.

Jay Capperauld’s Our Gilded Veins (2020) takes its title from the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken ceramics are reassembled using golden lacquer to highlight the repair, thereby creating a new piece of art. A 20-plus-minute concerto in all but name, it is tempting to hear in the opening orchestral scream a depiction of the breakage, the ensuing thematic fragments then being painstakingly – at times joyously – melded together by the flute’s golden joinery. (The big climax around 18' does suggest some minor calamity along the way, however!) Katherine Bryan’s tone and articulation are immaculate.

MacMillan’s other work here, The Death of Oscar (2012), is a tone poem based on Ossian’s saga of the death of his son in battle. Its combative, turbulent nature – the opening sounds like a fusion of Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem and John Williams’s Imperial March! – set it apart from the other pieces here, except Martin Suckling’s Meditation (after Donne), written to mark the centenary of the First World War’s end. A much subtler affair, Suckling’s quiet close featuring (pre-recorded) bells is undeniably affecting. If it and Clyne’s elegy are the expressive focal points of the album, then Rosemary Furniss’s arrangement for strings of Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness concludes proceedings in rather more sentimental vein. This gentle piece originated as a piano interlude for Max’s Yellow Cake Revue (1980), protesting plans for an Orcadian uranium mine. It may not end the album with a bang, but it is rather more than a whimper.