Playful and serious elements combine and interact in colourful and revealing ways on this album of orchestral compositions by Errollyn Wallen.

The most recent work, the lively Dances for Orchestra, presents Wallen’s music at its most immediately direct and accessible. ‘Dance’ is interpreted in all its myriad meanings in this 12-movement suite, which shifts from the Coplandesque ‘Dance I’ – full of bright and sappy hoedown rhythms and song Spirituals – to neoclassical Stravinsky in the light, feathery ‘Dance II’. At the other end of the spectrum, ‘Dance IV’ sees the orchestra grooving along to a laidback reggae shuffle, while in ‘Dance VI’ they execute a punchy electronic dance riff that would not sound out of place on a Ministry of Sound mixtape.

Dances for Orchestra explores more sombre and introspective moods, too, such as in ‘Dance V’, whose twisting lines and edgy harmonies suggest late Bartók and Shostakovich, or ‘Dance VIII’, which clothes a quotation from the Sarabande of Handel’s Suite in D minor in more dense and chromatic layers. Intensely expressive outbursts pepper the surfaces of By Gis and by Saint Charity, for voice and orchestra, which sets passages from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, soprano Ruby Hughes vividly capturing Ophelia’s disturbing descent into madness.

Appointed last year to the prestigious post of Master of the King’s Music, Wallen’s mastery of the orchestral medium is often found in her so-called ‘landscape’ compositions. These include on this recording the early The World’s Weather, whose concerto-style treatment of the orchestra results in bold and dynamic contrasts, and the majestic Mighty River. Benefiting from a performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra under John Andrews that fuses clarity, balance, energy and vigour, the latter’s use of minimalist-style pulsing provides a bedrock for the seamless flow of melodic lines and patterns whose sources lie in the Spirituals ‘Deep river’ and ‘Go down, Moses’ and the hymn ‘Amazing grace’.

More concrete and pictorial manifestations of landscape can be seen in This Frame Is Part of the Painting for mezzo-soprano and orchestra – Wallen’s self-penned poetry inspired by the drawings of British artist Howard Hodgkin – and Postcard for Magdalena, whose bittersweet homage to film director Margaret Williams encapsulates both the sad and joyful qualities that belong to this composer’s uniquely eclectic style within the space of barely a minute.