It’s weeks since I reviewed the last disc of orchestral music by Bernard Rands. No, I hadn’t heard of him either. But this flurry of exposure for Rands on record evidently has little to do with establishment back-slapping and everything to do with music of originality, honesty and distinction that we should be hearing more of even though the composer hasn’t lived in Britain for nearly half a century.

Rands describes his music as ‘colloquial rather than oratorical’, which you might say translates into works that appear to have a light touch but which are filled with rigour and discipline and clarity yet operate on a multitude of levels. Nono, Berio and Dallapicolla are totem figures. There is something of Messiaen’s care with sonority in Rands’s Piano Concerto (particularly the slow movement), which is obvious in its etching and yet altogether not obvious in all that it reveals over time. This performance from the 2014 Proms brings out its brittle, louche, atmospheric and lyrical-Italian feeling nicely, from Biss’s sure hands to the low-slung orchestral pizzicatos.

Canti del sole is a continuous journey through 14 poems, in two sets of seven, which chart the progress of a day from dawn to dusk. The poems, in four languages, are mostly from the Romantic big guns and while that brings the feeling of a patchwork, the music urges its way through any residual incongruity. In a premonition of the later Piano Concerto’s opening Fantasia, the piece grows ever more musically and philosophically complex before fading and disappearing. The tenor’s lyrical line belies the tensile churn of the large orchestra underneath, even if Stephen Chaundy’s performance here tends towards the railing and wound-up, as lustrous as his voice is. Perhaps because of that, the work seems to cry out for an orchestra-only breakout, either in screeching release or slackened repose. We get that, kind of, in the filler: Music for Shoko: Aubade, an arrangement of the middle movement of Rands’s Cor anglais Concerto in which those moments of tranquillity duly arrive. But they never stay for long. Rands has deeper things to say.