If there is a rightful claimant to the jazz-inflected orchestral legacy of Gershwin and Bernstein, it is surely Wynton Marsalis, whose Fourth Symphony blazes with all the cross-fertilising invention and fervour of his illustrious predecessors.

Composed in 2016 in six animated movements, it’s a variegated portrait of the city that never sleeps. Mirroring what Marsalis describes as its “dense mosaic of all kinds of people everywhere”, it becomes a musical melting pot of accents and influences. Not for nothing is it titled The Jungle.

Native American roots are explored in the nervous energy of The Big Scream (Black Elk Speaks), a swirling kaleidoscope of images and sensations. The Big Show is a brashly knowing cornucopia colliding ragtime, Broadway and the syncopated dance fads of a city finding its own dazzling identity.

Lost in Sight (Post-Pastoral) serves as a peppery reminder of the city’s darkest corners; a forlorn cello, Marsalis’s lonesome trumpet (strikingly heard against mimicked police car sirens), lost strings and woodwinds alluding to the metropolis’s “ubiquitous and invisible” unfortunates.

There is something wild and untamed, brazen and unapologetic, about La...