It is humbling that a self-taught European composer in his sixties can have written such a stack of well-crafted, emotionally honest and non-derivative music without anybody really noticing and with hardly a note being performed professionally. But as much as I or anyone else might like to meet and quiz Steve Elcock, let’s not get carried away.

The hyperactive literature talks of him possessing a ‘sense of symphonic momentum that has its roots in the Nordic-British tradition of Sibelius, Nielsen, Simpson …’ While there are obvious parallels in the music’s surface noise – but to my ears just as much of, say, Honegger or Walton – I would tentatively suggest that its inner workings and meta-flow are more rigid and compartmentalised. Before the composer’s Third Symphony breaks free in its third movement, the work’s order can resound to its detriment, suggesting the music of plan and process (as much in the use of a motivic cell as in movements constructed over an ostinato and a passacaglia).

That it’s difficult to gauge Elcock’s true significance from 70 minutes of music is reinforced by the differently conceived Choses renversées par le temps ou la destruction. This literal depiction of destruction slowly removes notes from the opening of the F sharp minor Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Again, the process can feel a little contrived but its central second movement is a wondrous surprise, distinctive and wrong-footing in its curious time signatures, even if the jury’s still out on matters of transitioning and tangible relationships to the surrounding movements.

If I’d waited so long to hear my music professionally rendered, I’d have wanted the strings to be better rehearsed and more prominently recorded, especially so in the Festive Overture with its bold overlapping fanfares (there’s the feeling here and in the other works that, in a textural sense, anything could happen). The only remaining question is whether a composer of true significance can acceptably remain untouched by at least half a century’s worth of linguistic evolution. Elcock’s passionate music born of splendid isolation – geographical, political, stylistic – goes some way, but only some, to making that question irrelevant.