Dutton’s revival of Arthur Butterworth’s extensive output continues in healthy style with this highly approachable collection spanning nearly half a century. Proceedings are launched with the imposing Fifth Symphony that Butterworth completed in 2002. Cast in three movements and lasting some 28 minutes, it’s the third of this composer’s six numbered symphonies I’ve encountered, and, at the risk of repeating myself, readers with a fondness for the likes of Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Moeran, Tubin and Lilburn will feel right at home in its rugged landscape. Indeed, some five minutes into the moody slow movement, there’s a conscious allusion to the Finnish master’s Fourth Symphony (I also detect a powerful kinship with Bax’s Morar compositions from the early 1930s such as the Fifth Symphony, The Tale the Pine Trees Knew and Northern Ballad No 2). Although penned some 44 years earlier, the Three Nocturnes, Northern Summer Nights, are cut from very much the same cloth, the last of them, “The eerie, silent forest in the stealthy darkness”, a magnificent specimen of atmospheric tone-painting (I was reminded of Bernard Herrmann’s superbly effective contributions to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Psycho).

Of the four remaining items, The Quiet Tarn and The Green Wind (both completed in 1960) make a satisfyingly contrasting diptych, Gigues (1969) is a toe-tapping, crowd-pleasing scherzo, while the inspiration for Coruscations (2007) was kindled by a mountain-top vista of the lights around Morecambe Bay in the gathering dusk. Throughout, Butterworth’s confident orchestral touch never deserts him.

As on last year’s coupling containing the Fourth Symphony and Viola Concerto (8/09), the RSNO turns in an eminently respectable set of perfomances under the 86-year-old composer’s sprightly baton. The extremely vivid engineering pulls no punches – and the balance, too, is very well judged – though the bass drum has a slightly “woofy” quality that some might find distracting. Admirers of this Manchester-born figure won’t require any further encouragement from me.