Yorkshire-born Patric Standford (b1939) was a pupil of Edmund Rubbra and Norman Del Mar at the Guildhall School of Music, where he taught for some 15 years before returning to his home county to take up university posts in Leeds and Huddersfield. Subtitled The Seasons – An English Year, the first of his six symphonies dates from 1972 and is cast in four movements. To my ears, the music stands up perfectly well on its own abstract terms, for Standford handles his arresting material with an enviable discipline, resourceful flair and unerring sense of purpose that betoken a true symphonist. Indeed, the slow movement for strings alone (conceived in memory of Barbirolli) has a gravity of utterance that put me in mind of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. Standford is also exceptionally adroit in his handling of a large orchestra: try the luminous Scherzo or quicksilver Prelude to a Fantasy from 1980, with which the programme concludes.

The Cello Concerto was written during 1974 when the composer and his wife were lucky enough to stay at Brahms’s summer home in Baden-Baden – hence the finale’s (uncommonly deft) incorporation of measures from the fifth movement (‘Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit’) of A German Requiem. Dedicatee Raphael Wallfisch gives a masterful reading of a satisfyingly meaty, big-hearted work whose chosen idiom may be frequently uncompromising in its rugged astringency but which certainly does not want for impeccable craftsmanship, keen proportion or communicative ardour. Like the First Symphony, it’s a piece thoroughly deserving of wider exposure.

This is the British Music Society label’s first venture into orchestral recording and it must be deemed an unbridled success. Not only are the performances under David Lloyd-Jones’s clear-headed direction consistently tidy and persuasive, the disc also benefits from really excellent production values. Do investigate some rewarding repertoire – and fingers crossed for more.