For more than a decade British composer Julian Anderson (b1967) has been consolidating his reputation as a leading talent. This first CD shows that talent at full stretch. The music is always direct in its tone of voice and unfailingly approachable without turning its back on all contact with progressive modernism. It has the benefit here of superbly prepared and executed performances, recorded with fine responsiveness to instrumental colour and textural balance.

The earliest work, Diptych, is already formidably accomplished in its control of gradually intensifying formal design but it is in Khorovod, Anderson’s first London Sinfonietta commission, that his feeling for balancing resonant harmonic densities and spontaneous melodic flow comes into its own. Anderson filters his admiration for such powerful contemporary presences as Per Nørgård and Tristan Murail through aspects of folk and popular music which are most immediately evident in the rhythmic and motivic profile of the piece. The result of such conjunctions could be mindlessly disparate but Anderson’s knack for dramatising unexpected compatibilities makes for an enthralling structure of genuine substance, and this kind of process is replicated on the more ambitious scale of his 1998 Proms commission, The Stations of the Sun, as well as in a second, no less rewarding Sinfonietta piece, Alhambra Fantasy.

The Stations of the Sun is complemented by The Crazed Moon, written slightly earlier, whose much darker, dance-free character indicates that Anderson is well able to inhabit quite different emotional spheres with equal success. With this release Ondine has made an impressive start to the Anderson discography, and it is good to hear that another disc of his music will soon appear. It is high time that Anderson was given his due.