John McCabe, who died in 2015, made some important recordings of other people’s music – he championed Carl Nielsen, and his survey of the complete Haydn piano sonatas has held its place in the Decca catalogue for half a century – but when it comes to his own works there are still gaps to be filled. Alongside the Symphony No 2, completed in 1971, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the conductor Kenneth Woods here supply the overdue premiere recordings of McCabe’s 2007 cello concerto Songline and his 1978 Symphony No 3.
The Symphony No 2 is tense and edgy, musing on the cyclical nature of violence; the cello concerto, its title inspired by ancient Aboriginal pathways, is restless in a different, searching way, which the soloist Raphael Wallfisch captures eloquently. What is striking and gratifying about both is the lucidity of McCabe’s music, its textures remaining clearly defined through writing of enormous colour and scope. The Symphony No 3, Hommages, inhabits a lusher soundworld, densely weaving in nods to Haydn and Nielsen while also looking in other directions – one passage with muted strings and celeste could almost be Shostakovich reimagined by the Strauss of Der Rosenkavalier. Vividly energised and expressive throughout, the performances do all three works justice.
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