I have long been – somewhat unfashionably, I suspect – an admirer of Alfredo Casella’s music (if not the man – see David Gallagher’s informative booklet-notes). Something of a stylistic changeling, Casella’s music itself is full of vim and originality, evident from the first two discs of Naxos’s enterprising series. These feature his earliest and last orchestral pieces – the First Symphony (1905) and Concerto for Strings, Piano and Timpani (1943) – as well as his earliest concertante work, the autobiographical “musical poem” A notte alta (“The Deepest Night”, 1917), inspired by his affair with his student Yvonne Müller, who became his second wife in 1921 – the year A notte alta was orchestrated. Strongly characterised night music, it is splendidly rendered by young Korean pianist Sun Hee You, a graduate of the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome, where Casella taught. The musical language of the Concerto is in marked contrast, with neo-Bachian driving rhythms, angular melodies and freer harmonies bordering on the atonal. The scoring recalls Martinu’s great Double Concerto (1938) and was also commissioned by Paul Sacher. One of Casella’s subtlest creations, it receives a fine performance from the Rome Symphony Orchestra and Francesco La Vecchia, albeit not the tautest I have heard.

The symphonies present a very different Casella: boldly late-Romantic, rich in youthful exuberance and burgeoning orchestral promise. Structurally and stylistically, the First sprawls through the gamut of influences the 22-year-old composer had encountered by 1905, from Brahms to Wagner via Bruckner, Strauss and the Russian nationalists. These last loom large in the Second (1910), as does Mahler, but overall No 2 is a more controlled work, recycling the First’s slow movement, rescored with an extra bar in the middle. La Vecchia takes an extra 37 seconds in No 2’s incarnation, making that a very long bar. The newcomer would be an automatic recommendation had Noseda’s rival account, also claimed as a “premiere recording”, not appeared recently. La Vecchia’s was recorded first, in January 2009, a full year before Noseda’s, but Chandos issued its disc first. Noseda’s is the better account: over six minutes swifter, the tighter structure pays dividends and the playing of the BBC Philharmonic is more refined. Chandos’s sound outstrips Naxos’s, although the latter’s is very clear.

Had Casella maintained this same rate of symphonic production throughout his career (No 3, to follow on Volume 3, only appeared in 1940), he would easily have overhauled Malipiero’s tally of 11 and might have become Italy’s answer to another close contemporary, Myaskovsky (who started his symphonic trail three years after Casella). But let’s be grateful for what we have and to Naxos for a most worthwhile series.