William Schuman (1910-92) deserves a good centenary. He was a great American – his first opera was about baseball – and he made his way to the top of musical administration and continued to compose. He became president of Lincoln Center in 1962, the year he completed his Eighth Symphony. He must have been busy because the last two movements are reworkings of some of his Fourth String Quartet, which he considered unreasonably difficult. All the same, the symphony comes off in Schuman’s granitic idiom stemming partly from Varèse and the more dissonant Copland, whose gritty orchestral Connotations is an exact contemporary. Bernstein conducted the premiere of Schuman’s Eighth and recorded it in the same year. This new recording completes the Naxos series of the symphonies – the composer withdrew the first two – which now also becomes available in a five-CD box-set.

Schuman said: “I really feel at home with the orchestra; I think that’s my metier.” He attached importance to what he called “form” but employed it in a completely instinctive way. This comes over as a long line of continuity, imposing and intense in the opening movement, drawing on Schuman’s characteristic chords of major and minor triads superimposed. The finale is rhythmic and lighter, but what might have been a consonant ending is torpedoed by superimposed elements.

Night Journey (1947) was the first of Schuman’s four ballet scores for Martha Graham. He condensed the original orchestral score to this version for 15 instruments. The story is the Oedipus legend so there’s a consistent astringency alleviated by a calm resolution at the end. Schuman’s witty scoring of Ives’s Variations on ‘America’ – a true American classic – then takes the taste away. These are committed performances throughout.