Opening this orchestral portrait of the American-British composer Bernard Rands is a Latino dance with a difference. There is no cheap melodic mimicry in this Brutalist homage to the Mexican poet Octavio Paz. There is no cut-and-paste appropriation of Latin American musical rhetoric and no enforced grooving like frustrated office workers at a Monday night salsa class. But the heat and the dance are still present and thrillingly so – on the music’s inside, and on Rands’s own terms.

Those terms, as this disc proves to anyone (like me) new to his music, are clear and integral. Rands studied with Dallapiccola and Berio and his music is lean, tense and melodically driven, even if those melodies are purposefully brittle and fragmented, and often rendered so by their context. I hear something of Magnus Lindberg in the way his larger canvases burst open towards grammatical colons like standing pillars (the woodwind-writing is often quite avian too).

The Cello Concerto (1996), written for Rostropovich, commissioned by the Boston Symphony and containing variations on the Welsh folk song ‘Hiraeth’, is nothing if not cosmopolitan. As befits the dedication, the solo part is charismatic but its relationship with the orchestra a little underexplored outside the central movement, in which Rostropovich’s admiration for existing material (Rands’s String Quartet No 2), and the positioning, allows the composer to breathe a little more freely. Johannes Moser is a committed and nuanced soloist.

We hear some of the same toned-down landscape-painting in the two movements of Chains Like the Sea after Dylan Thomas. ‘Wales was a pretty dreary place on a Sunday’, says Rands in explanation, but it’s a more satisfying aesthetic for these reflective, somewhat self-conscious and momentarily frenetic pieces than for the concerto, which can feel lacking in event and residue. The opening Danza petrificada (2010) shows that Rands can thrill as much as he can craft and at the same time too, as well as indicating a possible new direction in a voice that was discernibly forged late last century. The BBC Philharmonic sound like they have done far more than rehearse-record, unleashing all the wonder of Rands’s orchestration.