That Heinz Winbeck (1946-2019) was relatively unknown outside his native Germany only confirms the lack of recognition accorded Austro-German symphonism in the post-war era, to which this set of his symphonies makes handsome while regrettably posthumous amends.

Such quirkily subversive pieces as Entgegengesang (1973) or Lenau-Fantasien (1979) gave little inkling Winbeck might embrace this most historically loaded of genres, yet he did just that with his First Symphony (1983). Inspired by the fate of Sophie Scholl, along with that of the White Rose resistance in the Second World War, its Mahlerian (in impact if not in length) confrontation between unmediated violence and rapt eloquence was subsequently resolved in revision with a return to the opening music and followed by a conclusion of numbing finality.

Muhai Tang presides over a reading of this piece that is more propulsive than the admirable Wergo account and with far better sound. Dennis Russell Davies takes over for the Second Symphony (1987) – emotionally more equivocal in its trajectory from ominous expectancy, via mounting agitation, to a searching introspection itself denied by the percussive fusillade at the end. If this piece centres (aesthetically rather than stylistically) on the Romanticism of Schumann, the Third Symphony (1988) looks to Berg in its fractured expression articulated through poetry by Georg Trakl; cannily, his final poem (the work’s subtitle) is never set but instead recited toward the work’s climax, prior to a closing fantasia of fraught irresolution. A culmination in all respects, the Fourth Symphony (1993) sets further Trakl alongside Psalm 130 for an 80 minute work that ranges as though a Bosch-like fresco over Germanic culture in time of crisis, its seven continuous sections given symphonic cohesion by an underlying symmetry that tempers rhetorical overkill and makes possible the intriguingly oblique close.

After four such works in just over a decade, some 15 years passed before the Fifth Symphony (2009). Believing himself unable to complete the finale of Bruckner’s Ninth, Winbeck chose instead to embody themes from this torso within a piece of comparable scale and intensity. Its three movements unfold as a cumulative sequence towards a lengthy coda where Bruckner’s chorale hovers, vision-like, before fading into silence; in the process suggesting a ‘third way’, between the atrophied poles of modernism and minimalism, that Western music could pursue.

No texts or translations, but Thorsten Preuss contributes an extensive overview of each piece, with artwork by Winbeck’s friend Engelbert Hilbich adorning each disc. Quite a coup for the innovative TYXart label, and a mandatory purchase for open-minded listeners everywhere.