In 2002 Chandos initiated a new series of Berkeley recordings, conducted by Richard Hickox and sharing the discs between father Lennox and son Michael. Six volumes appeared (culminating in a disc featuring Lennox’s Two-Piano Concerto, 3/07), and while one wishes continued prosperity to this enterprise, it is good to be reminded of the pioneering recordings of Berkeley Snr first issued on Lyrita LPs.

The first two symphonies are considerable achievements. No 1 (completed in 1940, premiered in 1943) places itself within a field of stylistic attributes in which Walton, Prokofiev, Roussel and even – embryonically – Malcolm Arnold are stronger presences than Sibelius or Vaughan Williams. Both Berkeley’s First and VW’s Fifth were first heard at the Proms in 1943, so it’s notable how different the character of Berkeley’s slow-movement cor anglais solo is to that of VW’s Bunyan-inspired Romanza.

By the time he began work on his second symphony, in 1956, Berkeley would have been very aware of new, radical initiatives – not least connected with his pupils (for example Richard Rodney Bennett and David Bedford) at the Royal Academy of Music. The symphony could even be heard as a measured, thoughtful response to their youthful extravagances – celebrating the virtues of understatement yet providing an object lesson in how degrees of boldness and depth of expression could be tellingly integrated into the design. The work’s virtues are particularly well delineated in this LPO performance under Nicholas Braithwaite, and the remastered recordings offer plenty of atmosphere.

The concertos on the second disc suggest quite different aspects of Berkeley’s musical personality. In the Piano Concerto (1948), the idiom can come close to Rachmaninov-like romanticism – a bold gesture when Bartók would have been a more fashionable model. By contrast, the Two-Piano Concerto begins with almost Coplandesque clangour, and later suggests links with Poulenc and Martinu, affirming that French-based neo-classicism to which Berkeley owed so much. Though the pianos vanish from the action for quite long periods, this still strikes me as a more distinctive contribution to the concerto genre than its solo predecessor. But it’s the disc with the symphonies that offers the best value as a complement to the Chandos Berkeley series – at least as long as the Lyrita reissues remain at full price.