Now in his late forties, Raymond Yiu has gradually become known as a composer during the past decade. Born in Hong Kong and moving to England as a sixth-former, he then studied Engineering, yet his need to compose was encouraged by the SPNM (Society for the Promotion of New Music) and – eventually – the BBC. Now the enterprising Delphian label has put together a substantial programme of high-quality radio recordings, meticulously re-edited, with valuable booklet notes by John Fallas and Paul Griffiths. The result leaves no doubt whatever that Yiu is a composer with plenty to say and refreshingly direct, uninhibited ways of saying it.

The main offering has the simple title Symphony, although its formal design – four vocal settings interspersed with a pair of purely orchestral sections, the second a short prelude to the finale – might suggest a different title, such as Songs of Love and Death. The high point is the fourth movement, a setting of Thom Gunn’s ‘In Time of Plague’, whose relevance to the current experience of pandemic needs no underlining. Gunn’s subject was the Aids epidemic; and while Yiu might not achieve the same level of stark musical pathos as Michael Finnissy in his Aids monodrama Unknown Ground (1989), Andrew Watts’s peerless projection of word and tone makes it a startlingly raw lament. Yiu himself talks of ‘a flamboyant, seventies-style disco song’, but I suspect that listeners not familiar with this genre won’t immediately pigeonhole Yiu’s idiom as postmodernly ‘crossover’ in essence. As with his use of quotation in the two other works on the disc, the various allusions and associations do not draw attention to themselves as extraneous inserts, and Yiu’s own idiom is all the stronger for that. He has clearly profited from wide familiarity with the work of leading British composers of the day, but you’re unlikely to conclude that he’s dealing in second-hand Adès, Anderson or Benjamin.

After the Symphony’s Gunn setting, Yiu’s use of John Donne’s lines – ‘All other things to their destruction draw / Only our love hath no decay’ – seems even more idealistically upbeat than usual, fading on Mahlerian repetitions of ‘everlasting … ever’. Yiu also has ample scope for irony and ambiguity in the settings of Anthony Burgess that comprise The World Was Once All Miracle, qualities that Roderick Williams conveys with typical empathy in this tribute to the prolific poet, novelist and composer, despite the rather prosaic awkwardness of Burgess’s actual verse, which works best in the comic wordplay of the third movement’s hymn to ‘the music of the spheres’.

The earliest work, placed first on the album, is The London Citizen Exceedingly Injured, a ‘symphonic game for orchestra’. Neatly characterised by John Fallas as ‘a fabric of London-related inspirations both literary and musical’, this shows Yiu, in 2012, flexing his technical muscles and flair for bell-saturated orchestration to sustain a narrative flow that seems tempted to flag in places. However, the music soon compensates to build a subtly layered design whose unapologetic euphoniousness confirms Yiu’s distinctive feeling for the kind of mainstream models that best suit his own creative temperament. I won’t attempt to summarise Fallas’s intriguing explication of the title’s meaning here, but underline that, for Raymond Yiu, its multiple ramifications promote a ‘game’ of more than enough musical interest to engage even those listeners who haven’t already read the booklet notes.