The striking musical world of Welsh composer Grace Williams

There are neglected composers, and then there are Welsh composers. It’s just a question of geography. When Grace Williams’s Fairest of Stars was played at the Proms a few years back, it was hailed as a major rediscovery. That raised a few eyebrows in the Principality, where her music has long been standard repertoire. I grew up 20 minutes from the border and I’d played three of her orchestral works before I turned 30.

Still, there’s always more to discover, and this new disc breaks over you with the force of a Snowdonia rainstorm. The BBC Philharmonic lives up to its reputation as the most brilliant of the BBC’s English orchestras, and the conductor, John Andrews, is the man behind recent recordings of operas by Ethel Smyth and Malcolm Arnold. Williams’s voice is equally striking; as you’d expect from a composer who was friends with Britten, trained in Vienna under the Schoenberg pupil Egon Wellesz, and who emerged, unbreakable, as her own woman.

The main revelation is the Four Illustrations from the Legend of Rhiannon – a symphony in all but name, composed on the eve of war in 1939 and charged with a brooding, windswept energy. Williams’s inspiration was The Mabinogion, but there’s no Celtic whimsy here; just a powerful imagination and a fiery orchestral palette. Andrews finds an epic quality in the processional Castell Caernarfon, and the BBC Philharmonic strings give what must be the finest account on record of Williams’s masterpiece, the surging, impressionistic Sea Sketches. She was living on Hampstead Heath when she wrote it, but trust me: you’d never guess.