Those old enough to remember the 1970s and ’80s will no doubt be familiar with the idea of the mixtape, where listeners would spend hours creating compilation cassettes of their favourite composer, musical style or genre. While the legacy of the mixtape remains present in today’s playlists and daily mixes, transient and fragmentary listening modes brought about by the ‘shuffle mode culture’ have challenged traditional listening experiences.

On one level, ‘Dalia’s Mixtape’ – the brainchild of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s principal guest conductor, Dalia Stasevska – is an attempt to address the basic question of how we listen in the 21st century. In essence, the album poses the question ‘what if?’: what if I selected Anna Meredith’s Nautilus on a streaming device? What might it then choose to play? Perhaps a movement from Hans Abrahamsen’s arresting arrangements of Schoenberg’s Op 19 set of six piano pieces (which is what came up when I activated shuffle on my device), or maybe Andrea Tarrodi’s Wildwood, as on ‘Dalia’s Mixtape’.

Taking inspiration from the imposing presence of oak trees, Tarrodi’s impressive 23-minute tone poem contains ethereal slow-moving string lines and muted brass that build up to a series of strident climaxes, interspersed with beautiful birdsong-like calls and other skilfully orchestrated programmatic moments. In its own way, Wildwood is no less compelling than Meredith’s Mephistophelean marriage of Wagner and techno in Nautilus.

Placed next to the pulsing post-minimalism of Julia Wolfe’s Pretty and the skyward-facing shapes, circular patterns and ostinatos of Caroline Shaw’s The Observatory, Judith Weir seems something of an odd choice – an ‘algorithmic anomaly’ in the mixtape, as it were. Nevertheless, ambient-like qualities present in Weir’s Still, Glowing form an interesting match when listened to alongside Noriko Koide’s delicate, dreamlike Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain and Lauri Porra’s folk-infused Utu. In turn, these soundscape-based works are in stark contrast to SØS Gunver Ryberg’s Coexistence, whose brittle, dissonant acoustic and acousmatic surfaces seem tailor-made for a yet-to-be-created horror-film soundtrack.

The most expressive moments appear in the middle of the mix: Johann Johannsson’s The Miners’ Hymns gains further depth in a reorchestrated version of the opening movement (it would be interesting to hear the entire suite done this way), while Julius Eastman’s extraordinary Symphony No 2 (subtitled The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved) provides an intense personal evocation of lost love through a kind of fractured post-Ivesian harmonic language that is almost too painful to hear. These are exciting times for the BBC Symphony Orchestra, whose polished and committed performances do much to support Stasevska’s creative vision. It will be interesting to see what the conductor throws next into the mix.