Born in 1950, Enjott Schneider taught for many years at Munich’s University of Music and Performing Arts. His sizeable output includes eight operas, oratorios, organ concertos and symphonies, and some 600 scores for film and television (he wrote the music for Joseph Vilsmaier’s uncompromising 1993 movie Stalingrad). Certainly, the two gratefully lyrical and mellifluous miniature suites featured here – Herbstmilch and Die Flucht from 1988 and 2007 respectively – show him to be a dab hand at broad brushstrokes and recreating the sounds of nature.

Mention of the latter brings us to Naturklänge for strings and tape: written in 2012 and subtitled ‘Hommage à Sergiu Celibidache’, it’s a moody tone-painting incorporating sounds both electronic and natural as well as excerpts from the Romanian maestro’s spellbinding Munich PO recordings of Debussy’s La mer (‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’) and Ibéria (‘Les parfums de la nuit’) – all skilfully woven into the orchestral canvas by the Munich-based sound designer Friedrich M Dosch. Alas, to my ears at any rate, it’s an uncomfortably pallid essay, though I am at least thankful that, after an initial hearing, it prompted me to immerse myself all over again in Celi’s magical interpretations!

Sad to relate, I was similarly underwhelmed by Schneider’s ambitious Seventh Symphony (2012). Inspired by the spectacular landscape, myths and caverns of the Untersberg in the Bavarian Alps, it serves up an eclectic, disappointingly derivative mix (Mahler, Holst’s The Planets, John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Hans Zimmer). The composer writes of ‘a cinematic sound dramaturgy…the orchestra expanded by electronic enhancement’, but it’s still a pretty thin musical brew. Who knows, perhaps the symphony left an altogether more enduring impact on those who attended its 2013 premiere at the foot of the Untersberg itself.

If all this sounds like your cup of tea, then rest assured I cannot find fault with either the performances or engineering. For my own part, however, I fear that this is not a CD to which I can imagine myself returning any time soon.