The most significant item in this Scottish-themed collection is Helen Grime’s two-movement Elegiac Inflections for double wind quintet, commissioned by the Royal College of Music in 2005, of which this is the first recording.

The brief prefatory movement is more jaunty than elegiac – Till Eulenspiegel or, if we’re thinking Scotland, Tam O’Shanter, on the rampage. It’s in the longer second movement that the mood changes. The opening cor anglais solo conjures up an atmosphere not dissimilar to that at the start of Act 3 of Wagner’s Tristan – but this gently skirling meditation quickly evolves an elegiac quality that’s distinctively its own. You can follow the score online at wisemusicclassical.com.

I imagine most Maxwell Davies collectors will have the composer’s own 1996 recording of the last of his 10 Strathclyde Concertos, the 30-minute concerto for orchestra that’s a brilliant summation of much that’s gone before. Aside from having marginally brighter recorded sound, the Maxwell Davies recording has a greater sense of musical continuity, in the first movement at least – the composer holding the music strongly on course as its moods shift like those of some storm-threatened sea.

The slow movement, by contrast, could be said to have greater focus and intensity at Simon Crawford-Phillips’s slightly quicker tempo. Both ensembles relish the finale’s many delights, though it’s the astonishing virtuosity of Maxwell Davies’s Scottish Chamber Orchestra that retains the palm.

Crawford-Phillips is known as a gifted pianist with an eye for contemporary repertoire and for his work with the Nash Ensemble. Certainly, he and his Swedish chamber orchestra seem more at home in the two modern pieces than in the Mendelssohn – a tough ask for anything other than a front-rank orchestra, such is the intricacy of the writing and the unusual power and range of Mendelssohn’s orchestrations.

If I wanted a performance that’s both grand and picturesque, as Mendelssohn memorably found Scotland to be, I would opt for Klemperer’s 1960 Philharmonia recording. If that’s too much of an outlier for modern taste, there are other classic accounts, from Peter Maag and Claudio Abbado (twice), both with the LSO at peak powers, to Roger Norrington’s exhilarating Werktreue realisation with the London Classical Players. At the risk of stirring old schoolboy rivalries, I should also mention a rather good Chandos version superbly played by the CBSO under Crawford-Phillips’s Eton contemporary and fellow Music Scholar, Edward Gardner.

Both their readings are modern mainstream but, as with many latter-day chamber ensembles, the Västerås Sinfonietta often seem to be picking at the music – the result of vibrato-light string-playing and a tendency to starve notes of their full weight and rhythmic value in an attempt to give the music impetus and ‘point’. That said, the two inner movements – the dashing Vivace and the beautifully free-flowing Adagio – go well enough, so it’s not a complete walkover for the Maxwell Davies.