CD: Maw: Odyssey; etc: City of Birmingham Symphony/ Harding, et al

Now that the absurd hype surrounding the premiere of Nicholas Maw's opera Sophie's Choice at Covent Garden last December has evaporated, we can get back to appreciating what a good composer Maw can be with this timely reissue of his greatest orchestral achievement.

At 95 minutes, Odyssey is quite possibly the longest unbroken span of orchestral music ever written. More importantly, though, it is a wonderful demonstration of Maw's powers of organisation and thematic integration, and of the natural expressiveness of his musical language.

Maw could have been described as a neo-Romantic long before the term was invented, but as the 1985 Odyssey and the far slighter Dance Scenes show, his style is totally without contrivance; this is the music of a composer who has taken the threads of early 20th-century modernism to a very different endpoint from that of most of his contemporaries.