David Matthews continues to build on the rich British symphonic tradition, offering a principled alternative to those 20th-century styles that bore little if any audible relation to major-minor tonality. This latest album of his orchestral music plugs the one remaining gap in his recorded symphonic cycle (a CD including No 9 has already been issued – Nimbus, 7/19), and Matthews’s Eighth projects a winning eloquence and energy without ever lapsing into ponderousness. Even its dance-rhapsody finale – coming after two movements of strongly contrasted emotional substance – steers well clear of light-music triviality.

Many 20th-century composers, from Strauss to Shostakovich, showed how to retain a basis in tonality without writing music that simply parroted the styles and structures of earlier times. But since 1970 tonal composers have often made pacts with those forms of minimalism that prioritise consonance and exuberance, tacitly acknowledging that it is much harder to follow Sibelius and others in devising a distinctive style while keeping alive techniques which the radicals had declared moribund. As all the works on this album demonstrate, Matthews manages this difficult task with consistent freshness of expression and cogently shaped structures. His well-placed climaxes never pull their multicoloured punches, with imaginative orchestration admirably conveyed in these finely played and excellently engineered recordings. Rarely have dramatic outbursts of percussion sounded so thrilling, and for once they never overwhelm the rest of the orchestra: the balance here is ideal.

The world of nature is never far away in Matthews’s music, and two other recent orchestral works bear witness to his delight in contexts where haunting fragments of birdsong can emerge. Toward Sunrise doesn’t stint in suggesting the majestic power of the fiery star in question, while also – by way of soulful string melodies hinting at Mahlerian provenance – viewing the sun from an unmistakably human perspective. In A Vision of the Sea an epigraph from Shelley expresses archetypally romantic aspirations, prompting sumptuous orchestral textures that revisit the imposing climax of Toward Sunrise at the end. Finally, Matthews’s 2015 revision of his 1995 Sinfonia offers bracing treatment of rhythmic and harmonic patterns that echo The Rite of Spring. But these echoes appear only after the composer has prepared the ground with his own personal qualities of form and style, ensuring that an apotheosis blending the lyrical and the heroic is perfectly to scale.