The (one hopes) eventually comprehensive survey of Nikos Skalkottas on BIS has now arrived at a work central to his output: the 36 Greek Dances. Begun while the composer was living in Berlin in 1931, these were continued in Athens in 1933 and – after a period spent transcribing Greek folk songs from field recordings – completed in an intensive spell during 1935-36. Skalkottas returned to the cycle in 1949 – his last year – re-orchestrating most of the second and third series in a denser, more intricate style (Nikos Christodoulou opts for seven of these, and includes a further three as an appendix).

Although Bartók’s sets of folk dances – in their stripping away of sentiment to recover their themes’ expressive essence – are the most notable precedent, the tangy harmonies and rhythmic flexibility of ‘Tsamikos I’ make it clear that Skalkottas’s approach to his sources is an uninhibited and personal one. In the plangent ‘Kleftikos I’, he demonstrates a thematic logic worthy of Sibelius; elsewhere, such as ‘Dance of Zalongou’, the musical contours have a graphic descriptive power – elaborated in ‘Kretikos II’ into a miniature tone poem of luminous beauty.

Significantly, the distinction between binary and ternary forms customary in such music is often blurred by the cumulative unfolding of themes and motifs – hence such dances as the soulful ‘Kathistos’, where Skalkottas reinvents ‘folk’ music anew. Fascinating also is the wider context of his inspirations, as in ‘Makedonikos II’ – whose improvisatory central lament finds parallels in the Romanian doina – and ‘Mariori’, with its intensifying slow-fast alternation familiar from the Slavic dumka. An undoubted orchestral mastery is evident in such dances as ‘Epirotikos II’, with its delightful pointing up of melodic continuity throughout the texture, and the wistful ‘Arkadikos’, its idealised but not untroubled demeanour a paradigm for Skalkottas’s redefining of himself and his native musical culture that is a central feature of these dances.

A homecoming of an altogether more abstract nature is the inspiration for The Return of Ulysses (1942), the Overture to an opera which Skalkottas contemplated but seemingly never began. Given the scale (almost half an hour in this recording) and expressive scope of the piece, it could be that he felt the drama effectively encapsulated in instrumental terms. The pulsating, expectant opening sets the scene starkly and imaginatively – initiating a slow introduction whose dynamic curve is a fine example of the composer’s formal thinking. The expanded sonata design employs his 12-note (not serial) method to powerful effect, and culminates in a coda exhilarating in its sense of ‘arrival’.

Nikos Christodoulou gets a vibrant response from the BBC Symphony, attentive to the intricacies of the piece to a degree that escapes the headlong and often rough live performance from Miltiades Caridis. In the Greek Dances, his care over detail brings out an emotional subtlety which eludes the pioneering set by Byron Fidetzis and the enthusiastic but hard-pressed Ural State Philharmonic – though those who treasure Dimitri Mitropoulos’s 1956 account of four of the dances (Sony, nla) may find the new recording suave rather than scintillating in some of the faster numbers. The dry, but never airless recorded ambience projects the music with clarity and impact, and there are copious informative notes from Christodoulou (no disrespect in saying that it takes longer to read his insights into some of the dances than to listen to the pieces themselves!). In sum, an endlessly rewarding issue, and an ideal introduction to a composer whose stature grows with each new release in this series.