For all his skill as an operatic composer and word-setter, Britten was not a natural symphonist. The two larger works featured here represent his most convincing essays in the genre and are as different from each other as two such pieces could possibly be, conceived along quite dissimilar lines and neither abstract in form. The Sinfonia da Requiem (1939‑40) is one of the most gripping of all of Britten’s orchestral canvases and Simon Rattle’s much-reissued EMI recording with the CBSO (6/86) is one of the finest interpretations on disc, as Andrew Achenbach commented (4/03). This new live account, slightly swifter in tempo than his earlier recording, makes compelling sense expressively of the sequence of ‘Lacrymosa’ – ‘Dies irae’ – ‘Requiem aeternam’, in the reverse of that in the traditional Mass for the Dead.

The Spring Symphony (1948‑49) has long been one of my favourite Britten works, the apotheosis of the song-cycle as 40-minute vocal symphony, 10 songs grouped into three parts – two scherzos around a slower centrepiece – that ape conventional symphonic format. The whole is framed by two longer cantatas, the Introduction marking the transition from winter into spring, the finale the arrival of summer, with its goosebump-inducing climax where ‘Sumer is icumen in’ crashes in in full festive mood. It is a fine, taut reading with some superb singing by all concerned, swifter than some rivals, in the finale a shade too much so, with some muddy articulation. Hickox and – naturally – the composer (in the 1960s, available at time of writing only on an Alto reissue) pitch it perfectly. Rattle still thrills, nonetheless.

There is a similar effect, of course, in the finale of The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, when the original theme comes back at the end as the final voice of the fugue. Presented here, thankfully, without the distraction of a narrator, the subtleties of Britten’s design come out as they should. Rattle has form here, too, in a splendid CBSO recording only available in a much larger collection. That earlier version has a touch more zip than this new performance, which seems a touch perfunctory.