Among Welsh composers of the younger generation, Guto Pryderi Puw (b1971) looks likely to achieve real prominence. This disc of his orchestral music confirms an assured mastery of the medium – not least in ‘…unless I open the door…’ (2007), a tone-poem inspired by a tale from the Mabinogion whose twin aspects of celebration and trepidation are vividly reflected in its ever more fraught trajectory. Running the gamut from dense harmonic clusters to folk tunes, the judicious placing of its events more than outweighs its overtly short-term evolution – all making for a bracing embodiment of its narrative and a vivid showpiece in its own right.

The Oboe Concerto (2006) feels more abstract in its representing the human voice from three distinct speech contexts. Thus the insinuating lyricism of the opening ‘Rumour’, followed by the unyielding activity of ‘Chatter’; then the central Lento brings a measure of inward repose to which the cadenza forms an equable transition into the final ‘Stutter’, with its lightly ironic mood and demonstrative close – David Cowley unfazed by the demands of a notable addition to its genre. Reservoirs (2002) contrasts the visual appeal of such landscapes with the demise of communities they often engendered but the alternation of tranquil and aggressive episodes fails to build into a cumulatively sustained whole. Likewise in Hologram (2010), whose aural translation of this visual phenomenon affords a fastidious timbral interplay that rather fails to cohere in its later stages. No such doubts about Break the Stone (2009), a brief curtain-raiser whose melodic ideas are borne along by its rhythmic impetus through to the headlong close.

The steadfast advocacy of the BBC NOW and Jac van Steen is abetted by the immediacy of Cardiff’s Hoddinott Hall – resulting in a visceral statement of intent from a composer with whom to reckon.