Let me say right from the outset that this disc is as engaging, well performed and brightly recorded a programme of wind band music as I have encountered. And it is brilliantly well played and sonically very attractive indeed. That all the music was written by the excellent Kenneth Fuchs (b1956 and a student of Persichetti) – a disc of whose concertos I reviewed two years ago (A/18) – should be a surprise to no one familiar with his sumptuously scored and intelligently constructed orchestral and chamber music, issues of which have been reviewed in these pages for the past decade and more.

The alto saxophone concerto Rush (2012), in its full-orchestral guise, was one of the works I reviewed previously. As I commented then, it is ‘a rather Bernsteinian diptych … with a punchy, roof-raising final passacaglia’. If anything, it seems even more suited to a wind-orchestral accompaniment and Greg Case is as convincing and fluent a soloist as was Timothy McAllister beforehand (also on Naxos). The ‘fanfare-overture’ United Artists (2008) also exists in two versions, the wind band version based on a 2005 work written for the fuller forces of the London Symphony Orchestra.

The remaining works fall into two basic types: bright and breezy, rather celebratory overtures – Discover the Wild (2010), From the Field to the Sky (2012) and Forever Free (2013) – and longer, more meditative pieces such as Christina’s World (1997) and the title-track, Point of Tranquility (2017). Curiously these last two are, respectively, the oldest and most recent compositions featured, and both draw inspiration from paintings, by Morris Louis on the one hand, Andrew Wyeth on the other. I have not encountered the US Coast Guard Band before but on the evidence of this disc they are a formidably virtuoso ensemble. Naxos’s sound is as full-bodied as the band’s – a winning combination.