This disc of orchestral works is the latest in a string of recordings that have appeared since the time of Peter Dickinson’s 80th birthday in 2014. The pieces here tend towards the lighter side and major on his predilection for pastiche rather than the more consciously modernist outlook of the concertos (1/15), but also essay the ‘stylistic modulation’ that became the bedrock of his composing manifesto. This is the case with the Satie Transformations, the largest work here, which takes the form of variants on the first three of the Frenchman’s Gnossiennes. Dance-like episodes bring to mind in some ways the foxtrot pastiches of Dickinson’s exact contemporary and fellow Lancastrian Peter Maxwell Davies. In fact, the work’s sound world sits somewhere in between Max’s early parodies and the ebullience of his Boyfriend arrangements. Dickinson’s dances, though, seem to arise more naturally; Max’s always to me felt somehow contrived and forced. But perhaps that was the idea.

Satie has been a major project throughout Dickinson’s career but jazz and blues, too, are crucial components in his compositional arsenal. They are deployed in Bach in Blue, in which a Gershwinesque clarinet and a Grappellian violin present a quasi-improvisational gloss on the chords of the C major Prelude from the first book of the ‘48’. ‘I felt that there must be a blues lurking somewhere beneath Bach’s chords,’ writes the composer, ‘and found it here.’ Merseyside Echoes opts for the rock music that came out of Liverpool in the 1960s and combines two Beatles pastiches, of which the first is a clear homage to ‘Can’t buy me love’, before combining them à la Ives.

Ives is present too in the Sarabande of the Five Diversions, but then so are Copland and Hindemith. Even a serious piece such as the early Monologue is based on a motif from a Richard Rodgers song. The theme of A Birthday Surprise will come as no surprise – but perhaps its treatment will.

Throughout, as in the concertos, there is an evident joy in subverting a music’s original purpose through stylistic juxtapositions and Dickinson’s piquant orchestration. The BBC NOW barely put a foot wrong. It’s wonderful at last to have top-quality premiere recordings of these eight works that have waited far too long to appear on record.