Paul Mealor has titled his third symphony Illumination, and this BBC National Orchestra of Wales concert premiering it also featured works that reflect other composers’ shared aspirations to light.

Segueing from William Mathias’s Helios, a landscape of the mind, to Per Nørgård’s Iris, invoking infinity, and from there into Sibelius’s tone poem Night Ride and Sunrise, it was a sequence that worked well together. Under the guiding hand of conductor Geoffrey Paterson, it also helped set up clues to Mealor’s musical affinities.

A quotation from Paradiso, the third and last section of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, provides the starting point for what is Mealor’s perpetual concern: the search – if not for paradise itself – then for a state of meditative and spiritual grace. In his single-movement 27-minute structure, tuned wine glasses, chosen for their aural purity, combine with celeste, bowed percussion and the upper octaves of the piano and strings to create a glistening soundscape, static and impassive. This material is organically connected to hugely contrasting passages of full-blown brassy lushness, a tumult of ascending and descending scales finally extending even to tubular bells. Yet these ecstatic sweeps of Mealor’s self-confessed romanticism – shades of Strauss as well as of Sibelius – somehow communicated less than the austere, more probing stretches.

Jonathan Dove’s Sunshine – its dancing rhythms overlaid with languorous melodic lines – was conceived as an encore piece for the Bamberg Orchestra, but here proved its equal worth as a lively overture to the symphony, its sudden brake-to-a-halt a mischievous ending.