My heart sank a bit when I saw George Crumb’s A Haunted Landscape (1984) on this programme. Much as I admire the late composer’s Ancient Voices of Children and his wild Makrokosmos series, A Haunted Landscape’s shrieks and thuds have always struck me as kind of cheap – like something out of a 1970s horror movie soundtrack. The New York Philharmonic recorded it under Arthur Weisberg (New World, 9/86) and Thomas Conlin’s account with the Warsaw Philharmonic packs a punch (Bridge, 4/02), but Robert Treviño and the Basque National Orchestra’s emphasis on atmosphere rather than scare tactics is the most persuasive yet. The vaporous whisper Treviño gets in some of the string passages put me in mind of Ives’s The Unanswered Question (as at 2'10"), and he somehow transforms the last minutes into a modernist’s take on the evocation of dawn that concludes Mussorgsky’s Night on the Bare Mountain.

Address for Orchestra (1959) was George Walker’s first major orchestral work. Inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, it’s the perfect entrée to Walker’s musical world as it contains all the elements of his mature output (motivic concision, stark contrasts and persistent variability) in a semi-tonal guise. Ian Hobson’s 2008 recording with the Sinfonia Varsovia for Albany is movingly eloquent, but Treviño’s interpretation is noticeably tauter, with heightened friction between the music’s sharp-edged exclamations and prose-like lyricism.

The score to Silvestre Revueltas’s 1940 ballet La coronela (‘The Lady Colonel’) about a ‘people’s revolution’, the Mexican composer’s final work, was lost soon after the premiere and reconstructed by José Limantour and Eduardo Hernández Moncada in the early Sixties. It’s a vibrantly colourful score and rather like a Latin American Petrushka in its cartoon-like unpredictability. Yet again, we already have a superb recording of it: Gisèle Ben-Dor’s with the Santa Barbara Symphony, originally on Koch (1/99) and reissued by Naxos. Treviño offers an alternative view that’s more playful – try at 4'29" in the second scene, ‘Los desheredados’ (‘The Disinherited’), for example – and has slightly more impetus overall. He’s also more imaginative in his characterisations – note the woozy, disorientating rubato he applies in ‘La pesadilla de Don Ferruco’ (‘Don Ferruco’s Nightmare’), or the Ivesian piling on at the end of the final scene, ‘El juicio final’ (‘The Last Judgement’).

I found the first instalment of ‘Americascapes’ (Ondine, 12/21) absolutely invaluable, and if the repertoire here isn’t in such urgent need of new recordings, I’m still immensely grateful for Treviño and his orchestra’s impassioned advocacy.