This third instalment of the Chandos Berkeley Edition, celebrating the centenary of Lennox Berkeley and the contrasting achievements of his son Michael, is the most powerful yet. It offers not only Lennox’s Fourth Symphony of 1977/8, one of his most ambitious works, but the strongest and most colourful music that I know from Michael in the richly atmospheric orchestral piece The Garden of Earthly Delights.

You would never recognise Lennox Berkeley’s Fourth Symphony as the work of a composer in his mid-seventies. It starts with a disconcerting bass clarinet solo, leading to a darkly intense slow introduction to the main first-movement Allegro, when a powerful brassy climax suddenly lets the music emerge momentarily into sunshine (4'21" into track 1). An extended, mainly contrapuntal, development section then leads to a brief, passionate coda providing a truncated summing-up. The central movement is a set of variations sharply contrasted, serving the purpose of both slow movement and scherzo; the finale brings a more relaxed resolution.

The Garden of Earthly Delights dates from 1998, a piece for a huge orchestra including quadruple woodwind and a wide-ranging percussion section, complete with ‘lion-roar’ – which is heard impressively as the third of the three sections begins (12'38" into track 9). This extravagant piece was written specially for the National Youth Orchestra in a Prom conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, hence the vast forces, and Michael Berkeley, appreciating what extended rehearsal time the young players enjoyed, did not hold back on providing a formidable challenge.

This 21-minute piece was inspired by a triptych of Hieronymus Bosch, with the three sections reflecting the panels depicting, in typically grotesque visions, ‘The Garden of Eden’, ‘Carnal Knowledge’ and ‘Hell’. Theconcept plainly liberated the composer’simagination, for though ‘The Garden of Eden’ represents nature’s awakening in a rather sinister way with chinking percussion, the atmospheric writing develops powerfully with a striking horn motif representing the majesty of creation (2'20" into track 9). ‘Carnal Knowledge’ contrasts thrusts of energy with recessive string-writing, leading to a an energetic dance in the section representing ‘Hell’. Richard Hickox inspires the BBC National Orchestra of Wales to a brilliant performance, vividly recorded, though the solo instruments spread round the hall, violin, soprano saxophone and trombone, are inevitably less well separated than they would be in surround sound.

In the energy of Michael Berkeley’s inspiration and his exuberant use of a big orchestra, I was reminded of some of the late works by two composers from his father’s generation, not just Berkeley’s friend and mentor, Sir Michael Tippett but Roberto Gerhard. There is a similar sense of controlled wildness, which is consistently attractive, however complex the textures are. Curiously, the disc leaves Michael Berkeley’s Cello Concerto till last, though it dates from 15 years earlier in 1983. Using a relatively small orchestra, it makes the soloist very much the centre, with a series of cadenzas, often meditative, punctuated by orchestral passages that seem to perform an interludial function. In a less tough idiom than The Garden, it is still a work inviting close study, particularly when the soloist’s performance is both brilliant and dedicated.