It is good to welcome a South American orchestra in a recording and performance as rich and spectacular as this. It may seem bold of BIS to rely on a relatively untried orchestra and its Brazilian conductor but such confidence has amply paid off. The Fountains of Rome (1915‑16) was the work which first established Respighi as a master of orchestration. Yet it was only when Toscanini, a lifelong admirer of the composer, took the work up in 1918 that its qualities came to be fully realised. Designedly, it is a musical picture postcard, with each of the four linked sections warmly evocative in describing first the fountains of the Valle Giulia at dawn, of the Tritone at midday, of the Trevi in the afternoon and of the Villa Medici at sunset.

The spectacular BIS recording in SACD brings out all the atmospheric qualities, as it does in the second and most popular work of the Trilogy, The Pines of Rome (1924). The opening movement, “The Pines of the Villa Borghese”, opens gloriously with a shimmering from the full orchestra, while the third of the four sections, “The Pines of the Janiculum”, introduces what was regarded as radical at the time, the sound of a nightingale singing, originally on an old 78rpm disc. The recording now is much more faithful, though on this disc the sound is too distant to make its full mark. The final section, “The Pines of the Appian Way”, involves heavy brass in illustrating the tramp of Roman legions.

The final work of the Trilogy, Roman Festivals (1928), is at once the longest, most ambitious yet least inspired of the three. Even so, in a brilliant performance such as this one, helped by spectacular sound, it is highly enjoyable. The first section illustrates gladiatorial combat in the Roman Circus, and the final section brings a riot of sound in “La Befana” (“The Epiphany”), with clashing rhythms one against the other, and with even a hint of a tarantella. It makes a splendid conclusion to a highly enjoyable disc.

From the days of LP even so fine a version of all three sections as that from Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestrta cannot compete against the claims of the finest of modern digital versions, as presented here, though Yan-Pascal Tortelier’s Chandos version is on balance even finer, if not on SACD.