Roberto Sierra (b1953) composed his Sinfonietta for string orchestra (2020) and Sixth Symphony (2022) expressly for Domingo Hindoyan – the former for a pandemic-era programme the conductor was leading with the Detroit Symphony, the latter for Hindoyan’s inaugural concert as music director of the RLPO.

The Sinfonietta is a terrific piece. Its syncopated outer movements swing and sway – a characteristic inspired by Latin American dance forms that one hears in much of the Puerto Rican-born composer’s music – yet there’s ardent lyricism, too. Indeed, the hushed slow movement contains some of Sierra’s most haunting melodic ideas, while the scurrying slip of a Scherzo, with its predominance of pizzicato writing, offers an unexpected hint of something sinister.

The Sixth Symphony has striking passages but doesn’t quite hang together for me the way the Sinfonietta does. Here, again, the delicately scored slow movement is a highlight. Sierra describes it as evoking ‘a magical night in the tropics’, and I sense a whiff of romance as well, but at three and a half minutes it feels almost too slight. The third movement’s depiction of a hurricane continues the tradition of storm-painting (Beethoven’s Pastoral was a model, the composer writes) but doesn’t really add much to it. And yet I almost always find something in Sierra’s music that catches my ear. In the finale, it’s some of the connective passages, like the chattering cascades of woodwinds at 1'12".

Fandangos (2000) – based on music by Soler, Boccherini and Scarlatti – has been recorded before, including a swashbuckling account by Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony (Naxos, 5/14^US), but Hindoyan and the RLPO find a strain of elegance and sensuality that’s wholly compelling. The disc opens with the exuberant, brightly coloured Alegría (1996), an effective and pithy curtain-raiser that’s also been recorded before (in a version for wind ensemble). The Two Pieces for Orchestra (2017) are new to the catalogue, and they’re well worth hearing. In the first, ‘Like a lament’, Sierra creates a miniature musical world that’s alluringly dark and abounds with lush detail, while the dancelike second piece demonstrates his ability to build tension phrase by phrase. The RLPO play with precision and gusto throughout, and the recorded sound is excellent.