As in its predecessor (6/18), there’s more hard labour on display in this attractive second volume of Łukasz Borowicz’s cycle of Hugo Alfvén’s symphonies. Like Sibelius’s Second and Stenhammar’s serenades, Alfvén’s Third is a Nordic work written in Italy, ‘an expression of the sunny happiness’ that coursed through the composer as he worked on it near Sori in 1905. That happiness makes itself felt more in bustling activity than in thematic inspiration, but the bustle itself does well to obscure the lack of truly distinctive material. The best movement is the brooding, rising Andante. In the finale, machinery and efficiency are to the fore once more.

Stig Jacobsen’s booklet claims for Alfvén the master orchestrator are fully justified by the composer’s suite from The Mountain King, perhaps the most remarkable music here in terms of sound. We hear nature in all its moods, with filmic derring-do and mesmerising effects in the third movement, ‘Summer Rain’ (is that a saxophone solo I hear?). Once more, the sound of a classy Berlin orchestra makes all the difference to the imposition of the music.

After those evocations of nature, Alfvén’s Uppsala Rhapsody is a paean to that other indispensable element of Nordic life: alcohol. Like Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, it clothes drinking songs in respectable garb, but Alfvén goes a little further with one or two comic touches he might have picked up from Richard Strauss. Well-behaved Alfvén might not be the distinctive musical personality (and consistently rewarding discovery) of Kurt Atterberg but this is a charming, interesting and laudable series with some wonderful playing.