Good to see, barely a year after the last disc of his music (7/06), a further CD of Philip Grange appearing. Not the least asset of this disc is making available The Kingdom of Bones (1983) – a setting of texts (in Russian) by Kim Ballard about the spread of plague and sustaining of hope against implacable odds, in an idiom translating the essence of late Shostakovich into powerfully individual terms. New vocal music had no finer 1980s advocate than Linda Hirst, and the intensity of her rendition alone justifies the release of this BBC account.

Equally worthy is the revival of Lowry Dreamscape (1992), a sombrely aggressive piece for brass band conveying a darker side to the Salford artist, viscerally rendered by the now-defunct Sun Life Band. Diptych (2002) contrasts the agility of oboe and harp in “Sky-Maze with Song Shards” with the ruminative cor anglais and harp in “Daedalus’s Lament”, the idea of flight leading to disaster apt as a memorial to 9/11. Jinny Shaw gives her all here, as does Sarah Williamson in the Concerto for Clarinet Radical (2000). Its subtitle, “Ever growing, never stopping”, defines the nature of a piece whose soloist incites the symphonic wind band to music of explosive energy before the inevitable collapse.

For all Grange’s interest in Chinese culture, there is nothing glibly exotic about a work as uncompromising as any that he has yet written. It rounds off a programme that, with its expert transfers of recordings from various locations as well as penetrating notes by the composer, can claim to be the most rewarding disc of Grange’s music yet released.