The Panufnik Composers Scheme, currently in its twelfth year, provides opportunities for up to six composers each year to work with members of the London Symphony Orchestra under the supervision of Colin Matthews, with the aim of producing a short, three-minute work, which is then rehearsed and performed. The fruits of the first five years of the scheme were documented in ‘The Panufnik Legacies I’ (which I reviewed in TEMPO, 70/276), and the sequel covered here consists of a selection of nine works drawn from the succeeding three years, 2011–13. At a generous total playing time of over 75 minutes, this CD is a more ambitious project than the earlier compilation, and all of the performances again feature the LSO conducted by the highly accomplished François-Xavier Roth.

A reason for the extended length of this new collection is the decision to include Panufnik Variations, an LSO commission from 2013 here given a performance of characteristic virtuosity. The material for this substantial 25-minute work is taken from Andrzej Panufnik's setting of Alexander Pope's Universal Prayer (1969). As well as orchestrating the theme, Colin Matthews frames the work by providing the opening and closing variations – thus reflecting the structure of Panufnik's original work in which the 13 verses of the poem are set to a loosely palindromic design. The remaining nine variations function as a showcase in which various composers who had participated in the first five years of the scheme make cameo appearances, each contributing a single variation of between two and three minutes. Whilst the standard of craftsmanship is uniformly high, the result is inevitably something of a pièce d'occasion: only fleetingly, as in the remarkably effective transition from Toby Young's exuberant contribution to Elizabeth Winter's delicately scored central variation, is there a compelling sense of structural logic to the cycle. It is wholly appropriate for the great Polish composer and benefactor of the scheme to be honoured, but one cannot help but reflect that an opportunity has been missed to commission a large-scale musical tribute from one of the talented composers featured on this CD.

At the heart of the scheme remains the collaboration between composers and members of the orchestra, and the continuing fruits are shown in the nine works that comprise the remainder of the CD. Perhaps as a consequence of freedom from the constraints of a strongly characterised thematic subject, these works tend to be more adventurous in musical character and stylistically diverse than the preceding Panufnik Variations. Three of the featured composers, Elizabeth Ogonek, Aaron Parker and James Moriarty, exploit the durational restriction by contributing what are in essence a series of fragments – presumably designed with future additions in mind. In all these compositions there is in the precisely balanced textures and awareness of the spatial dimension of orchestral sound the acknowledged influence of the sound world of electronic music.

A more challenging structure than that of a series of fragments is a through-composed piece, and the orchestra's rhythmic élan and virtuosity are shown at their best in such works as Bushra El-Turk's engaging Timesis, with its beautifully crafted, brief, final section. By contrast, Alastair Putt's Spiral is one of two more extended pieces in the collection. Unlike such acknowledged masters as Stockhausen and Ligeti whose use of Fibonacci proportions creates a sense of ebb and flow, Putt's deployment of the sequence to generate both the global structure and the melodic and harmonic detail results in a gradual acceleration in musical events starting from the deceptively simple, almost Ravelian opening with its parallel woodwind chords. The result is a strikingly individual, densely textured work and, if there is a sense that not all the issues of balance are solved in this recording, the result is undeniably compelling.

The other extended work, Matthew Kaner's The Calligrapher's Manuscript, takes the form of two linked halves inspired by the designs of the seventeenth-century German scribe Johann Hering. The composer draws a parallel between the intricate calligraphy of Hering's manuscript and the detailed figuration which opens the first section of the piece, before the various strands coalesce into a melodic line – a process not dissimilar to that of Ligeti's Melodien, and revealing a fastidious ear for orchestral texture. A slowly rotating series of harmonies on the strings dominates the second half of the work, with filigree ornamentation on the woodwind again suggesting a musical equivalent to the luxuriant tracery of the calligraphy, an excerpt from which is reproduced in the informative accompanying booklet. A short coda brings this impressive work and the CD as a whole to a conclusion.

The LSO is to be congratulated on the continuing development of the Panufnik Composers Scheme. A particularly welcome feature of this new collection is the opportunity for two gifted composers to go beyond the three-minute restriction; in each case, they have produced accomplished works which deserve to enter the orchestral repertoire. This is a most stimulating collection overall, and one which augers well for the future of the project.