Nikolay Roslavets (1881-1944) may have been a pupil of Ippolitov-Ivanov but it was Schoenberg’s influence which proved crucial to his mature development. Little surprise, then, that he should essay a chamber symphony, but until recently only a fragment from 1926 (completed by Alexander Raskatov in the 1990s) was thought to have survived. What no one realised was that Roslavets wrote – and completed – a second a decade later, discovered only a few years ago.

In four large movements lasting together almost an hour (even the Scherzo is only a few seconds shy of 10 minutes), this second Chamber Symphony (1934-35) is beautifully written, limpidly scored for 18 players (including piano). Its atmosphere is strongly suggestive of Schoenberg’s E minor single-span predecessor and may contain, as Calum MacDonald’s notes suggest, some crafty homages to the Austrian master that the authorities would have disapproved of. Yet it is also a very different kind of work with a wider expressive range, its harmonic idiom still retaining a few traces of another of Roslavets’s formative influences, Scriabin.

And it is the latter’s music which colours the coupling, the early symphonic poem In the Hours of the New Moon (given here in Raskatov’s performing edition), written around 1910 for a much larger orchestra. The music shimmers through two massive climaxes before closing in the rapt hush with which it began. The BBC Scottish SO’s performances are simply wonderful; full praise to Ilan Volkov for two well prepared and keenly felt interpretations. The sound is superlative, too.