It is Gordon Jacob’s use of the orchestra in his Piano Concerto No 2 that rouses the admiration more than any thematic material or structural device. Here is an arresting, accessible and individual work (like the other two, here receiving its first recording) that demands to be heard more often – at least when played like this. A shorthand way of describing it might be ‘British-educated love child of Poulenc and Prokofiev’. It was completed in 1957 and premiered in July that year by its dedicatee Edith Vogel. You can hear online the broadcast of its second performance given just a month later in a Prom with the same soloist, Basil Cameron and the LSO, who set out at an even brisker pace than Callaghan and his colleagues, the latter of course in far superior sound and greater detail. The outer movements are extrovert and exuberant. The long central movement is very different, a set of variations, sombre and brooding for the most part but with some sections that might be the incidental music from a contemporary black-and-white movie with John Mills and Valerie Hobson.

The same image popped into my head unbidden during much of Addison’s Variations (written in 1948) – not surprising given his distinguished career as a film composer (Reach for the Sky, A Taste of Honey, Tom Jones and A Bridge Too Far among his soundtracks). A funereal, forbidding theme leads to a second, subdued, expressive variation, followed by an exciting moto perpetuo (superbly articulated by Callaghan) before eventually subsiding and ending much as it began.

Edmund Rubbra, like John Addison, appeared on Callaghan’s first volume of British piano concertos (6/22). George Vass takes over the baton from Stephen Bell for his Piano Concerto, Op 30, not to be confused with the (possibly) more familiar Op 85 Concerto in G (recorded by Denis Matthews, Malcolm Binns and Piers Lane). It dates from 1932 and is ‘the composer’s first fully fledged, large-scale work for soloist and orchestra’, as Paul Conway informs us in his most useful and informative booklet. It was well received at its premiere, although the composer himself was apparently dissatisfied with it and it remained unpublished during his lifetime. I think I’m with Rubbra, but maybe I must listen to it more. The first movement has its moments (Rubbra clearly knew his Vaughan Williams and gives his soloist plenty to think about), the second movement seems repetitive and meandering, while the finale is a jolly faux Scottish jig that’s just a little too relentless. Simon Callaghan is winning a deserved reputation as a formidable advocate of forgotten British scores like these and has found a natural home with the ever-adventurous Lyrita label.