Ever had the feeling you’ve been somewhere before? If you know and like Michael Torke’s work then familiarity is part of the deal. Consequence is not. Torke thinks positive, acts positive, writes positive. There’s a zest about his music, a celebratory quality. Its predominant features are its airiness and buoyancy. So a piece like Jasper (and these are all world première recordings) doodles with an idea until the doodles become much more significant than the idea. Or perhaps ‘significant’ is too strong a word. If you enjoy the sensation of flying and don’t much care about the destination, then this is for you. We’re told that the piece was inspired by views of Lake Superior. Whatever: the climax brings us the aerial shot and, briefly, it is sensational. But if you’re caught checking your watch in the preceding 10 or so minutes, then you’ll never qualify as a Torke frequent-flyer.

For me, the majority of Torke’s pieces are at least 50 per cent too long. Even Javelin (which I love) and one or two of the colour-coded pieces – like Green and Bright Blue – would, for my money, be brighter and sharper for being tighter. You’d probably not question their worth if their concision matched their dynamism. Torke plainly begs to differ. He talks of ‘sustained feeling for its own sake’. And at least he’s honest about it. You either buy in or you don’t. Rapture – dazzlingly played here by Colin Currie – comes in at nearly half-an-hour: while it’s good to encounter a percussion concerto that gives equal weight (a movement each) to the full spectrum of instruments – ‘Drums and Woods’, ‘Mallets’, ‘Metals’ – instead of the usual marimba-led rambles, the ‘sustained feeling’ (inspired, for what it’s worth, by the Pantheistic sexual rapture of WB Yeats’s News for a Delphic Oracle) is rather too sustained for its own sake. Surrender to it, says Torke. For me, that implies defeat.

I’ve left the best (and most curious) till last. An American Abroad is, in every sense, something of a departure for Torke. It’s as if he, ‘the American’, the eagle, has landed in our green and pleasant land early in the last century, because this is precisely the kind of piece that any number of Englishmen – a committee, perhaps, comprising Bax, Ireland, and a less foxy William Walton – might have written at that time. There’s even a protracted oboe pastorale à la Delius ushering in the sweetly reflective chiming of church bells. Talk about back to the future. But maybe Torke’s happier facing that way. Sounds like it. Marin Alsop and the RSNO (excellent playing and recording throughout) almost persuade me that it’s not a minute (or five) too long.