This is a portrait of a musician who, in the 12 years covered (1960-72), evolved from being a schoolmaster to prominence on the professional musical scene as composer and conductor. In the earliest composition, the carols and instrumental sonatas from O magnum mysterium are performed by the schoolboys for whom they were written. It’s a pity to lose the work’s concluding organ fantasia, which casts a very different musical spell, but this ‘school music’ reveals the essence of the chant-derived melody and modal harmony to which the composer has remained remarkably faithful down the years.

These well-filled discs illustrate most aspects of Maxwell Davies’s work from this period. The brief Seven in Nomine and the large-scale Second Fantasia on John Taverner’s ‘In Nomine’ both relate to the opera Taverner, completed in 1968 and first performed in 1972. The Fantasia is a particular rarity, since it didn’t form part of the composer’s recordings with Collins Classics; and although this performance can’t mask the immense challenges it poses to its interpreters, Sir Charles Groves and the New Philharmonia leave one in no doubt as to its substance and its quasi-symphonic stature.

The works on the second disc demonstrate two quite different (though not unrelated) musical worlds. Antechrist and the Missa super ‘L’homme armé’ portray Max the swinging-’60s parodist, and their sardonic reflections on cruelty and betrayal – religious and otherwise – remain potent today. But for a more balanced expressive character, in which foxtrots and other ‘foreign’ styles give way to a more refined though still intensely expressionistic idiom, there are two scores representing the composer’s early encounter with the poetry of George Mackay Brown and with the Orkney culture bound up with the story of Saint Magnus.

Both From Stone to Thorn and the Hymn to St Magnus are tributes to the technical skills of The Fires of London and their supremely characterful vocalist Mary Thomas. The large-scale Hymn (1972) looks forward to the cycle of symphonies and concertos which would begin the following year, but its extraordinarily concentrated third section still breathes the purest expressionistic fire. There’s much else from these hugely productive years, including the complete Taverner, of which recordings are sorely needed. Nevertheless, this is a substantial and vivid sampling of a composer revelling in his new-found maturity and individuality. The recordings are of variable quality, though most still sound well. Texts are notable by their absence.