Encountering Humphrey Searle’s music is like stumbling across a Wyndham Lewis painting in a British art gallery among all those twee idylls: art with its ears turned to tomorrow. But his Second Symphony catches Searle during an awkward moment of transition. He had yet to reconcile serial composition with his desire to compose symphonies. Searle had studied 12-tone composition with Anton Webern, but in the 1950s writing symphonies is what weighty, significant British composers felt they ought to be doing, I guess.

The dilemma: serialism opens channels into structural labyrinths that are alien to traditional symphonic rhetoric. Searle’s masterful Third, Fourth and Fifth symphonies solved that undermining problem by gradually pushing conventional form to the margins, defining a structure specific to each work. The Second attempts to graft serial workings-out onto the contours of tonal music. Some of the material is magnificent. The harmonic spectrum outlined in the opening moments is rich in possibility. The pacy finale touches harmonic ecstasy. But Searle’s dogged determination to make this a symphony – contrived recapitulations, strangely incongruous cadences and second-hand gesturing – suffocates the open-ended potential of his material.

Alun Francis’s 1995 performance (CPO) was a workmanlike and slick but Joseph Krips and a well drilled LPO in 1973 offer something more soulful. The two symphonies by Eton music master Robert Still are core Lyrita territory but it’s dispiriting to find a composer seriously peddling stuffy cod-Elgar in 1960 and ’64. Hearing these works confirms that Eton’s greatest musical legacy is another Humphrey: Lyttelton.