The year 1972 was a cracking one for symphonies – more especially for what might be called symphonies against the grain. In Russia, Schnittke completed his First, toying with but eventually rejecting the title of ‘anti-Symphony’ in view of his drastic juxtaposition of composed and non-composed music. In Britain, Tippett completed his scarcely less ambitious Third, with its dramatic quotation of the Schreckensfanfare of Beethoven’s Ninth leading to an ode not to Joy but to Sorrow. And Robert Simpson composed his Fifth on either side of a brain haemorrhage.

Simpson’s Fifth is a work full of sound and fury, but told by a seasoned symphonist and signifying a very great deal. It’s a cataclysm of negative energy, premised on the kinds of music Simpson scorned: pieces that began with a ‘weird hum or throb’, as he put it, and those that were imprisoned by neat, mathematical schemes. He engages the former syndrome in a fight to the death, then in a numb, shell-shocked deconstruction and a painstaking reconstruction. The arch-shaped five-movement scheme gives him an overall template to be shaped and reconfigured, rather than merely submitted to. The LSO’s premiere performance under Andrew Davis is a tour de force, swifter and more venomous than Vernon Handley’s fine studio account, which may be more stable and precisely balanced but which in terms of vividness pales in comparison.

The most natural partner for the Fifth Symphony would be the scarcely less mighty Fourth, completed in the same symphonic annus mirabilis. But that would have broken the bounds of a single CD, and it may even be that a recording of the premiere does not survive. No matter. An issue of the 1980 premiere of the Sixth Symphony is still to be welcomed, even if the performance doesn’t match that of the Fifth in fiery intensity (Jürgen Schaarwächter’s helpful essay admits that the composer himself was less satisfied with it). Whether the piece itself rises to quite the same level as Simpson’s finest could be debated; at the very least it’s a distinguished contribution to the minority genre of the two-movement symphony, worthy of honorary mention alongside Simpson’s own Third and Eleventh, Nielsen’s Fifth, Tippett’s Third and Per Nørgård’s Fourth.

The BBC recording quality is inevitably less refined than Hyperion’s for Handley. But this is a disc that I shall certainly be inflicting on visitors, as and when that near-forgotten species rematerialises.