The 1991 recording of Ilya Muromets, Reinhold Glière’s epic Third Symphony, was the first the BBC Philharmonic made for Chandos, inaugurating a partnership that has had over 200 successors. It also fulfilled a longstanding ambition of Sir Edward Downes to tackle the work. If not the symphony’s first outing on disc, it remains the best and led to the release of all three splendid symphonies (completed in the short timespan 1900‑11 despite the composer living until 1956), suites from his ballets The Red Poppy (1927) and The Bronze Horseman (1948‑49) plus the Horn Concerto (all under Downes’s baton) and a fascinating selection of shorter pieces conducted by Sinaisky. True, the concertos for coloratura soprano (1943, once recorded by Sutherland and which Netrebko has taken up), harp (1938) and cello (1946) are missing but this five-disc compilation merits an unreserved welcome.

Glière adapted quietly to the conditions of Soviet rule, dutifully fulfilling official conditions, often with politically correct use of musical elements from further-flung cultures of the Empire. Thus Gyul’sara (1936), Holiday at Ferghana (1940) and Shakh-Senem (1926) respectively deploy Tajik, Uzbek and Azeri features; only the quasi-tone-poem Heroic March for the Buryiat-Mongolian ASSR (1927, which I listened to while flying over Mongolia) has an openly political point in its juxtaposition of the Tsarist anthem and the Internationale.

In avoiding abstract forms such as the symphony post-Revolution, Glière escaped the dangerous criticisms that former pupil Prokofiev and especially Shostakovich had to endure. Glière’s party-line pieces, while slighter in content and ambition, do not show the same falling-off in quality of many of Shostakovich’s. His lighter music, such as the Ballad (neatly delivered by Peter Dixon), Concert Waltz and some sections of the suites were calculated to endear, while in the Overture on Slavonic Themes and The Zaporozhy Cossacks (1921) he plied this lighter style on a larger scale. Glière’s accommodation with the regime no doubt irked those colleagues anxious for artistic freedom but he seems to have been unbothered by the constraints.

Chandos’s recordings still sound glorious and the orchestra’s manifest engagement with the music shines through. Watkins is excellent in the Horn Concerto but overall it is Downes’s enthusiasm that makes the set so valuable. It is really a memorial to him as much as the Bax symphonies are for Tod Handley and anyone who warms to the latter (Bax was a noted Russophile) will thoroughly enjoy these discs. I know I did.