John McCabe’s orchestral music has never lacked advocates, yet its appearance on disc remains intermittent enough for every substantial release to feel like an act of reclamation. This Signum programme is especially valuable: the Third Symphony and Cello Concerto receive their first recordings, while the Second at last acquires a modern alternative to Louis Frémaux’s pioneering 1972 CBSO account. Spanning nearly four decades, the three works reveal not a composer repeatedly reinventing himself but one continually refining an individual language – rhythmically alert, harmonically mobile and fastidiously scored, with argument and colour held in unusually productive balance.

The Second Symphony, written in 1971, takes its structural impulse from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch. McCabe was less interested in the film’s violence than in its inexorable circular design: the symphony’s five interdependent sections form a single arc, ending with the phrase heard at its opening. Conductor Kenneth Woods understands that the work’s continuity depends not on smoothing its contrasts but on making them propel one another. The opening Vivo is taut and impatient, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s woodwind bright-edged against pungent percussion; yet the succeeding Andante settles into nocturnal stillness without losing the underlying pulse. The scherzo-like Allegrissimo has balletic quickness before turning aggressive, while the Lento’s horn-led meditation rises with impressive inevitability. In the final Vivo, Woods keeps the proliferating counterpoint lucid and the culminating violence firmly within the larger architecture.

Frémaux’s performance retains a raw, period electricity, but Woods (together with a production team headed by producer Andrew Keener and engineer Oscar Torres) offers greater transparency and a more vividly differentiated orchestral palette. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra responds with virtuosity that never becomes merely decorative. McCabe’s busy textures can appear crowded when their internal hierarchy is blurred; here harp, piano, celesta and percussion register as structural voices rather than glittering accessories. The Signum recording is spacious but well focused, giving climaxes weight without sacrificing the chamber-musical exchanges from which they grow.

The Cello Concerto, Songline, dates from 2007 and unfolds continuously across three linked spans. Its title refers to routes sung into being by Australian aboriginals, though McCabe universalised the idea as a journey through memory, encounter and return. Soloist Raphael Wallfisch resists the temptation to turn the solo part into a heroic confrontation. His opening is lithe, purposeful and conversational, negotiating the quick music with seasoned ease while preserving a certain inwardness. That restraint pays its richest dividend in the long central Adagio, where the cello’s elaborate song is sustained with grave concentration. Wallfisch’s tone is not invariably voluptuous; instead, he varies its grain and pressure so that the line seems to think aloud. Woods keeps the lightly scored orchestra responsive around him, and the brief return to energetic motion at the close acquires an almost unsettling abruptness.

Symphony no.3, Hommages, completed in 1978, is the disc’s most immediately captivating discovery. Haydn and Nielsen supply its principal points of reference: a theme related to the slow movement of Haydn’s op.76 no.6 Quartet and chords derived from Nielsen’s Piano Suite, op.45. Yet this is no collage: McCabe absorbs both into a three-movement structure whose boundaries overlap, beginning with the flexible, fantasia-like opening and passing into an Adagio in which Haydn’s music seems simultaneously quoted, examined and remembered. Woods is particularly persuasive in the finale, a gradually accelerating fusion of fugue and variation. He allows its contrapuntal machinery to gather momentum naturally, so that the return of the opening materials feels earned rather than ceremonially imposed. The orchestra catches the score’s shifting perspectives superbly: sensuous without vagueness in the impressionistic passages, incisive in the Nielsen-like harmonic blocks and warmly eloquent when the Haydn ghost comes into focus.

This is an intelligently planned and finely executed release, restoring three major works to the centre of McCabe’s achievement. Wallfisch brings to Songline wisdom and emotional reserve; Woods and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra bring to all three scores structural conviction, colour and urgency. This is indispensable listening for anyone interested in the British symphony after Tippett and Simpson – and persuasive evidence that McCabe’s neglect is becoming increasingly indefensible. Taken as a whole, the disc makes a compelling case for McCabe as both master craftsman and unmistakably personal musical dramatist of distinction.