Whereas previous instalments of Navona’s mixed-composer ‘Prisma’ series have featured multiple performers, Vol 3 features just one orchestra, the Janáček Philharmonic in Ostrava, albeit with two conductors, Robert KruŽík directing the items by Ahmed Alabaca and Audun Vassdal, Jiří Petrdlík conducting the remainder.

Taken together, the seven works form a rather fine and entertaining album. None of the composers is front-line, perhaps, but some of the works definitely deserve wide currency. Ahmed Alabaca’s clarinet-and-orchestral Ascension, for instance, I could quite see enjoying popularity with its elegiac character (mourning the passing of a clarinettist friend of the composer’s) and style close to Copland in the opening movement of his Clarinet Concerto. Sarah Wallin Huff’s The Dark Glass Sinfonia (2017), on the other hand, is less heart-on-sleeve but no less involving a listen. There is much to enjoy, too, in Raisa Orshansky’s Spring Fantasy and Craig Morris’s engaging suite Songs of the Seasons, the four meteorologically themed movements of which describe, respectively, a ‘Winter Snowfall’, ‘Spring Raindrops’, ‘Summer Waves’ and ‘Fall Colors’.

The most gripping work here is Noam Faingold’s The Defiant Poet: Elegy in Memory of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, commenced shortly after the poet’s death in Tulsa (where Faingold also lives) in 2017 and completed that summer. The work is a tone poem inspired by some of the poet’s most famous works and catches their air of protest (‘Babiy Yar’, not least) compellingly. By contrast, Scott Brickman’s Restoration is more rhetorical in form, without the same burning inner compulsion of Faingold’s tribute, impressive though it sounds. Norwegian-born Audun Vassdal’s Prelude and Fugue is more curious, a rather elusive, Blomdahlesque creation.

The performances are well rehearsed and well recorded for the most part, though Brickman’s Restoration does sound a little tubthumping in places. Definitely worth exploring.