For those of us who are evangelical about Glass’s trail-blazing early work, encounters with his new pieces are becoming increasingly painful experiences. At least the recent release of his Sixth Symphony (4/06), gave us an excuse to enjoy Allen Ginsberg’s remarkable poem again but the Eighth is a purely instrumental work from which there’s little escape.

Glass’s early works created a white canvas which he filled with wonderfully novel shapes; but now he has regressed to orchestral archetypes that sound like equivalents of still lifes and fruit bowls. This symphony treats the orchestra as we all know it sounds. Strings chug their motor rhythms, woodwinds decorate lavishly and a packhorse timpani player gives the heads up on tonic and dominant. There’s the occasional flash of a characteristic Glassian harmonic progression or a juicy bitonal woodwind flourish that transcends the dowdy landscape. But otherwise the magic’s gone.

The compromises are largely structural. The opening has traces of Glass’s interest in Prokofiev and Shostakovich but, with tonality as literal as this, Glass is obliged to think in episodic paragraphs that the 20-minute arch of this opening movement just can’t sustain. In his early music there was invigorating tension between the extended durations and the sparse material. Now the ratio is more conventional and the music is blighted by a determination to be correct. Two further movements, the last dominated by a maudlin oboe theme, dig him in deeper. The performance, conducted by long-term Glass interpreter Dennis Russell Davies, is sympathetic and enthusiastically executed.