CD: Musgrave/ Helios/ etc: Daniel/ Van Steen, et al.

NMC has been in existence since 1988, steadily expanding its catalogue of recordings of living British composers and making constantly available on disc (nothing is ever deleted) a whole range of works that the mainstream industry would be wary of releasing.

For some time its mission to promote British new music was shared with labels like Collins Classics and Unicorn-Kanchana. Both of those fell on hard times in the late 1990s, however, and their catalogues have been dispersed.

NMC was quick to acquire some of that archive material, and in the newly launched Ancora series it plans to reissue those recordings, supplementing them with extra works where appropriate. In the first batch of releases, for instance, three of the four works by Thea Musgrave (born 1928), Helios, Night Music and The Seasons, originally formed a Collins Classics disc, and for this re-release NMC has added to them the bicentenary "concerto in homage to Beethoven", Memento Vitae.

The two concertos by Hugh Wood (born 1932) appeared together on a Unicorn-Kanchana disc, while John Buller's Proença and The Theatre of Memory each originally had a Unicorn-Kanchana LP to itself. Similar compilations of music by David Matthews, Nigel Osborne and John Casken are in the NMC pipeline too.

All three of these initial discs contain top-quality works that in a perfect world should never have been allowed to disappear from the CD catalogue; they wear well. It is particularly good to get the chance to hear again Buller's Proença, first performed at the Proms in 1972, for it is by any standards one of the great achievements of recent British music. It is an intensely dramatic, incessantly colourful evocation of the world of the 12th-century troubadours, with settings for mezzo-soprano of Provençal lyrics that offer a potted history of the Languedoc culture, and introduces a solo electric guitar to add a pungent edge to two of the climactic sections.

The purely orchestral Theatre of Memory, completed in 1981, is marginally less compelling, though it still shows Buller's discerning, rigorous technique, his orchestral mastery and his continuing fascination with the rituals of Greek drama. Wood's concertos date from 1969 (the Cello) and 1970 (the Violin) are characteristically gritty, structurally impeccable works, every bar apparently carved out of a single, dense block of material. They are real, highly wrought concertos, building upon the great tradition but never content just to imitate it.

Individually, the works in the Musgrave collection may not be as substantial as Buller's and Wood's, but none of them is negligible. Helios is a neatly proportioned oboe concerto from 1994, beautifully played by Nicholas Daniel, while Musgrave describes her 1969 Night Music as a "dreamscape"; it's a quickly shifting, multi-faceted single movement in which two horns take soloistic roles.

The four short movements of The Seasons (1988) were each inspired by a painting, while Memento Vitae's Beethoven tribute weaves a clutch of quotations from the composer into a typically theatrical Musgrave scena. The performances are first rate, as they are on all of these very welcome reissues.