Poised as we are between the anniversary celebrations of Arnold Schoenberg in 2024 and Pierre Boulez’s centenary in 2025, there remains a not insubstantial elephant in the room: the linguistic gulf between tonal and atonal, serial and non-serial music. The ideological battles of the last century may have long abated in favour of today’s easy-listening stylistic no man’s land (with a handful of honourable exceptions) but at the time they were very real and often painful. Richard Rodney Bennett’s output presents a vivid demonstration of the gulf in question. After studying under Lennox Berkeley at the RAM he then went to work with Boulez in Paris, and as one of the most prodigiously gifted and versatile of all young British composers would have been able to produce fully convincing examples of the work of both mentors and practically everybody else in between. But where was he himself and his own personal musical voice?

Volume 5 of Chandos’s enterprising series of Bennett’s orchestral music presents a musical cornucopia that straddles this very gulf in characteristic manner. The Concerto for Orchestra of 1973 is partly based on a deliberate ‘Tema seriale’ from Britten’s 1959 Cantata academica – but where Britten resolves matters tonally (and never embraced fully atonal serialism), Bennett pens a dazzlingly scored and pithily structured atonal kaleidoscope that still sounds fresh and engaging today. But would I know it to be by Bennett if listening blindfolded? Probably not. The album concludes with the engaging variation-set Diversions from 1990. By now the composer has just passed the epiphany that saw him abandoning atonality for concert works in favour of a more traditional language, and the answer here is that I probably would have recognised the individual voice. This doesn’t, however, necessarily mean that the one work is intrinsically better than the other.

At the heart of the programme sits the major discovery here, a half-hour cello concerto (in all but name) entitled Sonnets to Orpheus, composed for the 1979 Edinburgh Festival, where it was premiered by Heinrich Schiff. This is its first recording and is a genuine discovery in that it never made any headway in the concert hall either, so it now emerges as if freshly minted. In his illuminating booklet note, Richard Bratby places it at a crisis point in Bennett’s personal life, and something of this does seem to colour much of the heartfelt anguish that animates the solo cello line. The concerto is cast as five movements – some discrete, with others linked together – and there is a compelling narrative arc to the music, which coheres convincingly on both structural and emotional levels. Norwegian cellist Jonathan Aasgaard is a close colleague of conductor John Wilson and their natural partnership ensures a performance of rare eloquence. Yes, this is mainly an atonal work, but its power is such that it triumphs over questions of style in establishing its own validity of communication. This splendid recording should at last make it many new friends.