Johan Wagenaar was a Dutch composer roughly contemporary with Elgar: born in 1862, he died in 1941. He began his musical career as an organist but quickly became an academic. He was appointed in 1919 to be the director of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague.

As one might expect, his style is relatively conservative but it is consistently marked by the most skilled use of the orchestra, with magical pianissimo effects and consistently transparent textures, perhaps surprising from a musician who started life as an organist. The overture inspired by Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, said to be Wagenaar’s most popular work, is a delightful comedy overture with heavy brass in the central development section skilfully used and a surging reprise of the main theme led by the violins. The Summer of Life, described as a “fantasy for orchestra”, is the most substantial piece of the five works on the disc, exhilarating in its main climax but ending quietly, as most of Wagenaar’s orchestral works seem to do. Plainly he was not intent on drawing shouts of approval from his audiences but rather a warm response to the beauty of his orchestral writing.

The Romantic Intermezzo is exactly that, with important oboe solos. The final symphonic poem, Frithiof’s Sea-Voyage, is much the earliest of the works here but already demonstrates the composer’s confident handling of the orchestra. It was inspired by a Swedish saga and after a storm sequence leads to an optimistic close. First-rate recording and splendid playing by the North West German Philharmonia under Antony Hermus. A welcome disc of music by a composer almost totally forgotten, at least outside Holland.