The music of Alun Hoddinott, Daniel Jones and William Mathias is being celebrated in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’s series Welsh Foundations. A younger generation who built on their legacy also features, in this case, Hilary Tann, who was born in the Rhondda Valley and is now based in the US.

Tann’s The Grey Tide and the Green was conceived in tribute to the poet RS Thomas, the title taken from his poem Boundaries. Tann’s continued sense of rootedness in the Welsh landscape is a conditioning element in her scores, and here it was the swirls of wind captured in rippling figuration that caught the ear, precisely articulated by the orchestra’s wind players.

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man gave Hoddinott his title for The Sun, the Great Luminary of the Universe, a piece whose forcefully dissonant explosions suggest Judgment Day and where passages of calm periodically dissipate that tension. Lines by Dylan Thomas are invoked in the finale of Jones’s last symphony, In Memoriam John Fussell, dedicated to the organist and director of the Swansea international festival. The expressive effect of Jones’s string writing colours the work, with the composer’s quotation from his own organ prelude, A Refusal to Mourn, first in muted strings and then the organ itself, making for an uncompromising last gesture.

There was neither solemnity nor literary allusion in Mathias’s Third Piano Concerto. Conductor Tecwyn Evans relished its jazzy exuberance, as did soloist Llŷr Williams, his pianism vying memorably with Mathias’s glistening cascades of celeste.