Two sides of Edward Harper, now in his mid-sixties, emerge from this disc. In the main and most recent work, the Symphony No 2, completed in 2007, a large-scale design is employed and the subject-matter is nothing if not challenging. Faced with such horrors as the death of children – the first two vocal movements contrast a 19th-century elegy with a 21st-century lament for an Arab boy shot by Jewish soldiers – Harper seeks to derive a determinedly optimistic, upbeat perspective, approaching his final setting of Isaiah’s fantasy of universal harmony and peace by way of Walt Whitman’s fulsome hymn in praise of the “miracles” to be found in nature.

Finding a living musical language for such texts is no easy task, and Harper’s symphony lacks the edge, as well as the concentration and vitality so palpable in the smaller, shorter pieces that complete the disc. In particular, the Three Folk Settings for string quartet are quite masterly in the way their allusions to familiar folk materials are framed: forcefully in “The Lowlands of Scotland”, poignantly in “The Ash Grove” and with great good humour in “Mairi’s Wedding”.

Perhaps it is too easy for contemporary composers to “do” bleakness and melancholy, and to avoid sentimentality and earnestness, by shunning precisely the kind of topics Harper confronts in the symphony. It would certainly be interesting to discover how successfully another major work, his opera The Spire (based on William Golding’s novel) manages to realise its own big issues: and the two pieces called Scena included here, which relate to the opera, promise well in their forthrightness and expressive energy. All the performances seem admirable in commitment and character, with David Wilson-Johnson in particularly fine voice in the symphony. The recordings of the chamber works are first-rate, but that of the symphony risks too close a focus: a more spacious acoustic would have been preferable.