The vitality of these three works by the Irish composer Jerome de Bromhead (b. 1945) point to the sheer pleasure that their creator takes in writing music. The swirling ebullience of the tone-poem A Lay for a Light Year (2014) suggests the scale and energy of the cosmos. The edgy, elegiac lyricism of the Violin Concerto (2008) inhabits textures that are brittle and clear like Stravinsky’s. The more chromatic Second Symphony (1994) suggests a vast sense of space behind a glittering foreground of kaleidoscopic orchestral colours.

A member of his family, Lt Gonville Bromhead, who fought in the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, was made famous when Michael Caine played the part of Lt Bromhead in the 1964 film Zulu.

Alan Smale studied at the Royal Academy of Music, moving to Dublin in 1977 as co-leader of the then RTÉ Symphony Orchestra. In 1983 he was appointed Leader of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, and from 1993 to 2013 he was Leader of the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. During these years he developed a career as a soloist and chamber-music player, and became a well-known figure to Irish audiences through frequent solo TV appearances.

Colman Pearce (born in Dublin in 1938) is a composer and pianist as well as a conductor. He has conducted most of Ireland’s orchestras, among them the RTÉ Light Orchestra and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, with which he performed many works by contemporary international and Irish composers; he has also conducted for the Dublin Grand Opera Society and for the Wexford Opera Festival. Abroad he has been held positions with orchestras in Spain and the USA. He has made many recordings on the Naxos and Marco Polo labels. Since the 1990s he has devoted more time to composition.