It was with the works in his ‘Jewish cycle’ that Bloch established his creative personality after an apprenticeship gleaning what he could from Strauss, Debussy and César Franck. Schelomo is the most well known of these scores but the Israel Symphony makes a welcome reappearance in this luminous, passionate performance by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under the Israeli conductor Dalia Atlas. It was recorded as long ago as 2000 and was previously released on the ASV label. The only other readily available versions – by the Utah Symphony Orchestra under Maurice Abravanel (Vanguard, 9/69) and by the Russian State SO under Evgeni Svetlanov (3/00 – now on Brilliant Classics) – are even older though still highly competitive; but the blend of thrust, gleaming colour and meditative, serene soul-searching that Atlas and her forces bring to the score makes this a constructive addition to the Naxos catalogue.

The Suite for viola and orchestra, completed in 1919, is already on Naxos in a performance by Hong-Mei Xiao and the Budapest Symphony Orchestra MÁV but its coupling here with the Israel Symphony is a musically useful one: if the Suite does not, strictly speaking, fall within the orbit of Bloch’s ‘Jewish cycle’, its inflections and atmosphere do on occasion share common ground, along with the exoticisms that also light up the score. With the soloist Yuri Gandelsman and the Atlas Camerata Orchestra (recorded in 2001), there is a potent fusion of finesse and vitality.