Ernest John (‘Jack’) Moeran laboured over his never-to-be-finished Second Symphony for some 11 years until his death in Kenmare, County Kerry, on December 1, 1950. By May 1947 he seems to have decided upon a one-movement structure in four sections following the example of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. Indeed, around the same period, Lionel Hill (in his touching memoir of his close friendship with the composer entitled Lonely Waters) tantalisingly recalls hearing Moeran play through the entire score on the piano (‘Oh, it was breathtaking in its sweep, very Irish in feeling’). Now the conductor Martin Yates (a pupil of Richard Arnell) has fashioned the surviving sketches into a powerful 33-minute symphonic edifice. It certainly makes for a fascinating and rewarding voyage of discovery, the inspiration often touchingly heartfelt (nowhere more so than in the third-movement Adagietto) and gripping in its scope of ambition. Moreover, connoisseurs will have a high old time pinning down the wealth of references to other pieces in Moeran’s output (I won’t spoil the fun).

Yates is also responsible for the sumptuous arrangement of Ireland’s masterly and magical Sarnia (a likeable companion for the immaculately idiomatic piano solo original), and the disc concludes with another gem of a Moeran completion, namely Rodney Newton’s idiomatic orchestration of a piano score (undated, but almost certainly from the first half of the 1930s) labelled simply ‘Overture’ and featuring material destined for the towering Symphony in G minor and cherishable Sinfonietta. True ‘EJ’ fans shouldn’t ignore this splendidly performed and ripely engineered Dutton anthology.