Three ballet scores that Stravinsky wrote for New York – Jeu de cartes (staged in 1937), Orpheus (1948) and Agon (1957) – are given virile, cogent performances by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov. Questions of style are closely observed, so that, while there are certain traits common to all three works, the individuality of each one is clearly delineated and, in the process, the progression of Stravinsky’s musical character is rendered all the more perceptible. Jeu de cartes, the most classically “neo-classical” of the three, is crisply sculpted and propulsive, the rhythmic sleights of hand diamond-sharp, the instrumental colours bold, the impact exhilarating.

With Orpheus, as Stephen Walsh describes in exemplary booklet-notes, Stravinsky achieves a “new austerity and intensity that might suggest a breaking away from the more mechanical aspects of neo-classicism”. And this performance is one that, while alert to neo-classicism’s incisive facets in, for example, the Furies’ dance of the second scene, also hauntingly summons up the darker, softer, more mysterious and intimate atmosphere that the music emanates. Agon, even with some fleet, rhythmically cross-cut numbers that hark back to razor-like neo-classicism, enters even stranger worlds in its refraction of such ancient dances as the sarabande, galliard and branle through a 20th-century prism and in its piquant combination of instruments, with mandolin and harp eerily deployed and Stravinsky’s ability to surprise at its most alert. The statuesque quality of these ballets is ever-present, but these performances also bring them vividly to life in the mind’s eye.