I have vivid memories of 23-year-old Simon Rattle bounding onto the rostrum at the Royal Festival Hall, on February 2, 1978, to conduct the first performance of what was then called ‘Symphony by Peter Maxwell Davies’. In the recording, made six months later, Rattle and the Philharmonia were able to recreate much of the concentration and dramatic intensity which made the première so formidable. From the beginning there’s a fiercer attack, as well as a more forward sound, than on Sir Peter’s own recording, made with the BBC Philharmonic (Collins Classics, 12/95 – nla). Since it’s fair to say that Sir Simon has not conducted a great deal of Maxwell Davies in more recent times, hearing this performance again renews one’s regrets at the omission.

In the five numbered symphonies that followed No 1, Maxwell Davies’s twin debts to Mahler and Sibelius became more explicit, and his commitment to musical life north of Hadrian’s Wall, perhaps best exemplified in the ten Strathclyde Concertos written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, encouraged less elaborately wrought textures and less obliquely formulated thematic materials than Symphony No 1 displays. It remains a tough test, for conductors, players, and listeners, above all in the superbly atmospheric slow movement, where Rattle’s phenomenal ability to keep long-term goals in view and to shape extended paragraphs which, on the page, can appear alarmingly amorphous, is invaluable. Getting to know the work with the help of this performance remains a hugely rewarding experience, and this long-delayed reissue (the original LP won the Gramophone Contemporary Award for 1979) is therefore a notable event, the more so since the demise of Collins Classics means that very few of the composer’s major orchestral works are currently available on disc.

Also welcome is the music from Taverner, Sir Peter’s first opera, which provides a pungent reminder of his earlier parodic manner. The expert ensemble not only includes Gramophone’s Duncan Druce (violin) but also Elgar Howarth (trumpet) and the one-time BBC producer Misha Donat (keyboards).