Grace Williams (1906-1977) has never entirely dropped out of the repertoire thanks to the insouciant lollipop Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (heard most recently at the 2024 Last Night of the Proms). Not only was she Wales’ most notable female composer, she was the first British woman ever to score a feature film.

Born in Barry, Glamorgan, like Ruth Gipps, Imogen Holst and Elizabeth Maconchy she studied at London’s Royal College of Music with Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1930, she broadened her horizons by traveling to Vienna for a year with Egon Wellesz. Stressed and depressed after a decade-and-a-half teaching in London, she returned to her hometown where she settled down to a life of composition free from the musical politics that beset London and the changing regimes at the BBC.

In the 1970s, a handful of recordings for EMI and Decca (some of them reissued on Lyrita) kept her music in the public domain, but this marvellous collection of orchestral music with the BBC Philharmonic under John Andrews is a welcome reminder of her strengths and a splendid addition...