The Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921) was one of music’s great amateurs. An academic classicist by profession, he was self-taught as a composer, and, despite the admiration and encouragement of Mahler and Willem Mengelberg, never abandoned his day job as a teacher and private tutor. The works recorded here – misleadingly described on the cover as ‘symphonic poems’ – consist of concert versions of three of his theatre scores on classical subjects: an overture for Aristophanes’ The Birds (1918); choruses and melodramas for Sophocles’ Electra (1920), posthumously arranged as a symphonic suite by Eduard Reeser; and the incidental music for Marsyas (1910), a play by his pupil Balthazar Verhagen that reworks the grim Ovidian narrative of Marsyas and Apollo as a comedy of erotic rivalry.

Marsyas finds Diepenbrock in thrall to Debussy – he dubbed it ‘my faun’ – though the string writing also suggests a close familiarity with Verklärte Nacht. The Vogels overture, meanwhile, is pitched somewhere between the Meistersinger apprentices and Till Eulenspiegel, and contains some wonderfully complex woodwind polyphony. Though he admired Strauss, Diepenbrock deemed the latter’s Elektra un-Sophoclean, and his own score on the subject is not so much a study in obsession as a meditation on such ideas as the curse on the House of Atreus and the proscriptive nature of divine justice. Diepenbrock intended the choruses to be danced as well as sung, and the central movements are very balletic and rather genteel.

Though the music is variable, the performances are classy. Antony Hermus can’t quite disguise that fact that Marsyas meanders a bit, though the Bamberg Symphony’s playing is beautifully textured. Once past its agitated, Mahlerian opening, Elektra is all lofty nobility and graceful elegance: Reeser’s orchestration of the choruses can be monochrome and the vocal originals might have been preferable here. The Vogels overture is arguably the best and certainly the most consistent of the three scores; it’s done with impudent wit and panache, and the Bamberg woodwind are simply outstanding.