According to Michael Haas’s invaluable Forbidden Music (Yale UP: 2013), Walter Braunfels chose mental rather than physical emigration after the Nazis hounded him out of his job at the Cologne Music Academy – believing himself to be ‘a stone in the dam that was keeping evil from flooding everything’. One of the first ‘exile’ works that he completed, in 1936 (though he seems to have started it at least four years earlier), was the Orchestral Suite in E minor, recorded here for the first time.

Like the orchestral suites of Enescu and Dohnányi, it’s not quite what you might call symphonic (at least not in the Brahmsian sense) but it’s large in scale and unmistakably serious in purpose. Braunfels’s movement titles evoke the Baroque era – there’s a Präludium and a Sarabande – but the sound world is one in which late Romanticism has started to darken and grow chilly. The big, lowering central Marsch evokes Mahler one moment, Kurt Weill the next; and the second-movement Courante takes Bach’s A minor Fantasia and transforms it into a Totentanz: a musical symbol of German culture’s acceleration into the abyss.

Followers of the Braunfels revival will certainly want to hear this, and Wildner and his BBC forces go at it with a nervous, insistent energy that actually suits the music’s essentially tragic character well – as does the bass-heavy recorded sound. The other two (post-war) works are not new to disc but Piers Lane is easily the most alert and engaging pianist on record in the Hebridentänze (a sort of post-Romantic Scottish Fantasy for piano and orchestra) and the slightly rough-cut solo playing in the Sinfonia concertante is hardly a serious concern in repertoire as rare – and as deserving – as this.