I’ve written before about Bernstein assembling pieces where every note, gesture and timbre is hooked off other music but comes out sounding like Bernstein anyway. Works like Kaddish and Mass poach an incisive structural sharpness from Bernstein’s stylistic cut-and-paste, and this disc of early chamber works show those same impulses were already at play during the great man’s student years.

As a sweetener, there are two Eric Stern transcriptions. Four Moments from ‘Candide’ for violin and piano could well become a latter-day Carmen Fantasy given time (and a better title). William Terwilliger’s coloratura violin in “Glitter and be gay”, coming complete with bungee-jumping glissandos and gravity-don’t-bother-me note leaps, is infused with the spirit of Bernstein’s original vocal lines but sounds effortlessly violinistic. The Two House Songs, “Take Care of this House” from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and “My House” from Peter Pan, is second-tier in comparison, pleasant enough nevertheless.

But back to those unexpectedly revealing chamber works. The first movement of the 1937 Piano Trio – written when Bernstein was 19! – is perched somewhere between Wagner and Brahms, then (at 5'20") an obvious allusion to Beethoven, shoe-horned in from nowhere, nudges the music towards a late piano sonata-like fugal texture; and then the second movement is full-strength vaudeville, like a dummy run at “Gee, Officer Krupke”. Terwilliger’s violin transcription of Bernstein’s 1942 Clarinet Sonata makes a connection I’d previously missed: the circular melodies and wandering-ear harmonies of the opening Grazioso hint at melodic contours Bernstein would explore a decade later in his Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium).

Bernstein’s actual Violin Sonata (1939) cues up the rolling variation technique heard subsequently in Age of Anxiety, Dybbuk and Touches – Age of Anxiety even recycles material form the sonata. And so the Bernstein formula for composition was born – borrow what you like, it’s the resonance and inventiveness of the mix that counts.