‘Glorious and grand, magnificent and sublime’, ran a contemporary verdict on Mozart’s Gran Partita, music that both crowns and transcends the 18th-century tradition of wind-band music. In later centuries this sumptuous banquet of a piece inspired wind serenades by Dvořák, Richard Strauss (his two late sonatinas) and others. Most recently, British composer and clarinettist Mark Simpson was commissioned by the Britten Sinfonia to create a short partner work to the Gran Partita, using the same forces of 12 winds plus double bass.

Simpson only added the title Geysir – the Icelandic word for ‘geyser’ – at the suggestion of the dedicatee, Simon Holt. But it encapsulates a work that begins in tense, threatened stillness, then builds slowly to a shattering eruption before subsiding in luminous mystery. The ‘bubbling’ clarinets in Variation 5 of Mozart’s penultimate movement provided the cue for the subterranean murmurings of Geysir’s opening but Simpson’s seething, pulsating musical landscape, embracing violent extremes of texture, register and dynamics, exploits the ensemble’s potential in ways undreamt of by Mozart. Using the four horns far more lavishly, Simpson’s sound world veers between the darkly lurid, the garish and (at the close) the ethereal. At the volcanic climax, oboe and clarinet shriek acridly high above swirling flurries of sound, ‘like an old-fashioned kettle at a furious boil’, as Benjamin Poore puts it in his illuminating note.

Simpson sums up Geysir, with some understatement, as ‘a flurry of colour and harmonic shifts’. His elite players, led by oboist Nicholas Daniel and the composer himself, do him proud, in a performance of risk-taking virtuosity, recorded in the ideal ambience of Saffron Hall. They are just as convincing in the more companionable world of the Gran Partita, a work that, on disc at least, rarely fails to elicit the best in its players. With crisp rhythms and pointed accents they bring out the martial background of the opening Allegro. Both Minuets are bright and bouncy, their contrasting Trios well characterised (I loved the prominence of the smoky basset-horn in the first Trio of the first Minuet); and the variations are delightfully vivid, from the frisky buffo banter of Var 1 to the keening oboe over undulating clarinets and basset-horns in Var 5.

In their superb recent recording, the wind soloists of the Concertgebouw (BIS, 1/21) bring a more operatic expressiveness, and an undercurrent of disturbance, to the famous Adagio. But in their slightly cooler way Daniel, Simpson and basset-hornist Oliver Pashley are hardly less persuasive, dovetailing seamlessly and floating Mozart’s long melodic spans across the bar lines. In a teeming catalogue, this new Gran Partita more than holds its own. But the clinching factor for many will be Mark Simpson’s companion piece: a tour de force of wind colour and carefully controlled tension that makes an immediate impact and reveals more and more on repeated hearings.