There’s a rhythmic trick at work in the first of Ned Bigham’s Archipelago Dances Set 1, a wily spacing of the piano chords that had me listening hard and repeatedly. Where’s the tipping point in this chordal phrase? We never really know, which makes the canonic games of which it soon forms the basis even more alluring. That prompts you to listen differently to the lounge percussion that underpins this opening track’s bachata groove. Any minute, you think, it will start to bend, strain or metamorphose.

But it doesn’t. Bigham’s music as portrayed on this release is founded on rhythm (he is a former session drummer) but the rhythmic smoke and mirrors of that opening track is as interesting, rhythmically or otherwise, as this recording gets. The next movement, a broad, American-sized Pavane, is played straight towards a sort of laconic explosion. The third is founded on a Puerto Rican plena but does nothing with it. And so on and so on – a Polka in Archipelago Dances Set 2 that cries out for direction, development or transformation; an Estampie complete with crimplene cymbal scrapes that shuffles awkwardly away like an entire symphony orchestra dad-dancing with its eyes fixed on the floor.

There is something missing, literally, in the title piece Staffa, which was designed to accompany three concurrent pieces of film. But we don’t get the visuals with this product – we don’t get much (booklet notes deal with Staffa and nothing else) – so the music must be heard on its own terms. It was ‘inspired by Mendelssohn’s visit to Fingal’s Cave’, an experience which induced music of power, passion, terror, excitement and ultimately a broadening of the language. To my ears, the neatly overlapping shapes of that bachata Archipelago Dance speak far more of the island of Staffa’s rock formations. But I am at a loss as to what Bigham’s fluent noodling in his piece of the same name has to do with Mendelssohn’s experience. I feel for sure that the symphony orchestra isn’t the right medium for what he wanted to say in these pieces, and I fear that the fundamentals of the dance and symphonic genres he is trying to fuse have both been lessened by the process.