Ian Krouse (b1956) is probably known best on the one hand for works for guitar quartet (1/14), one based on a Led Zeppelin song (Delos DE3163), and on the other for his vocal music, including the powerful Armenian Requiem (7/19). As with that last-named, the Fifth Symphony is a commemorative piece, at least in its final 2017 form, marking the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, and its origins are as complex as the conflict that inspired it. The virile first movement, ‘Of Youth, Innocence, and Reflection’, is an expanded version of an orchestral Prelude-weaver (1998), while the remaining two, ‘Of the Apocalypse’ and ‘On the Beach at Night’ (an evocative setting of Whitman, strongly sung by Michael Dean), were complete by 2006 as independent wind-band works. If the symphony stays within relatively familiar tonal landscapes, the result is not unimpressive, as with the central movement’s juxtaposition of a Korean melody with ‘Amazing grace’ and two well-known fragments of Copland.

The composer’s own note suggests that the overtly ‘cinematic’ Fanfare for the Heroes of the Korean War (2020) ‘serves as a fitting coda for the brooding finish of the symphony’, which precedes it here. I do not hear it that way and prefer the Fanfare to precede the Symphony.

The two Symphonies of Strings (the plural title is a deliberate homage to Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments) date from 1993 and both started life in another guise, as pieces for one or more guitars. The Second (which has a lower opus number) is based on a Hasidic Jewish melody, while its larger stablemate – reworked from Krouse’s Third Guitar Quartet – is based on the famous tune ‘La folia’. They make a delightfully contrasted, skilfully achieved pair (though obviously exist quite separately) and round out the picture of the composer a touch. The performances by the Seocho Philharmonia and UCLA Brass Quintet are splendid and the recording resonant and full.