A Youthful Composer Orchestral music by William Alwyn, heard by PATRIC STANDFORD Naxos    8.570704

Naxos continues its championship of Alwyn's music with David Lloyd-Jones having already recorded all five symphonies and Peter Donohoe both the piano concertos. This CD presents Alwyn as a youthful composer, before the 1st Symphony in 1949 (when he had already written 58 of his 123 film scores) and just after the 2nd which appeared in 1953.

Among the very earliest of his orchestral concert works were five short Preludes (1927), barely more than tasters to his mature output. The last of them is barely fifty seconds long, a piece of wit and colour.

More substance begins to emerge in the sturdy Tragic Interlude written in 1936.

There is a Pastoral Fantasia for viola (Philip Dukes) and strings dating from 1939 and a stirring Overture to a Masque of 1940 that seems to consolidate a more optimistic style -- its closing pages summarize all its moods.

The first of Alwyn's Concerti Grossi appeared in 1943, written for the members of the London Symphony Orchestra with which he was at the time a flautist.

Autumn Legend is a haunting piece of atmospheric writing for cor anglais (Rachel Pankhurst) and strings, first heard in 1954

and there is also a Suite of Scottish Dances, spirited arrangements made with the hand of an expert.

Record Box is Music & Vision's regular series of shorter CD reviews