Like its predecessors, the third volume of Cecile Licad’s ‘Anthology of American Piano Music’ is a model of imaginative programme-building. Aaron Copland’s wistful Down a Country Lane raises a gentle curtain upon early 19th-century composer Anthony Philip Heinrich’s energetically naive The Minstrel’s March. This music provides a brilliant lead-in to the more strikingly idiosyncratic keyboard layout of Percy Grainger’s Spoon River, where Licad manages to make the passages in extreme registers sound full-bodied.

Licad’s long-proven instinct for Romantic breadth and ear-catching nuance fully manifests itself throughout William Mason’s scintillating Silver Spring and Edward MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches. She brings just the right kind of scurrying, nervous energy to the upward unison runs of ‘In Autumn’ while breathing fresh, easy-going life into that old chestnut ‘To a Wild Rose’. The rhythmic kick that Licad brings to Arthur Farwell’s Sourwood Mountain’s hoedown fiddle evocations couldn’t be more idiomatic, and the same can be said for her straightforward interpretations of the five pieces encompassing Farwell’s From Mesa and Plain, a suite based on Native American songs and dances. And given Licad’s splendid way with Gottschalk, it’s not surprising that she’s totally comfortable negotiating the syncopated sound world in the outer movements of William Grant Still’s A Deserted Plantation.

Leo Ornstein’s almost Scriabinesque A Morning in the Woods reveals an introspective side to a composer better known for his wilder futuristic style, and again suits Licad’s stylistic proclivities. But she slightly disappoints in the final two selections. The wonderful harmonic ideas in Roy Harris’s Streets of Laredo are undermined by Licad’s overly fast and casually phrased performance; I find that the music’s plain and granitic demeanour are better served by the austere deliberation of Geoffrey Burleson’s Naxos recording. Plus her twitchy rubato in Cadman’s From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water often makes it difficult to ascertain the basic pulse. However, on the whole, Licad’s caring and intelligent performances and the savvy programme selection by David Dubal and executive producer Thomas Nickelsen augur well for future volumes.