For ‘Escape to Paradise’, Daniel Hope has brought together two generations of composers who were and are linked indelibly to the sound of Hollywood. The former number Korngold, Rózsa and Waxman, European immigrants fleeing Hitler’s ambitions, and their successors include John Williams and Thomas Newman. Other names edge in by a whisker: Kurt Weill, for instance, with ‘Speak low’ from One Touch of Venus, and ‘As time goes by’, another Broadway song, now indelibly linked to Casablanca. The lyric by Sting for ‘The Secret Marriage’ replaces Brecht’s touching original in Eisler’s The Hollywood Songbook.

Daniel Hope is very much the star of this enterprise, not only making the case for his concept in the booklet in conversation with Michael Haas but also by being photographed half a dozen times on mock-ups of Hollywood sound stages. At the heart of this disc is his swashbuckling performance of Korngold’s Violin Concerto, where Hope brings off with aplomb the tension between the work’s contrasting lyrical ideas and the electric energy of the virtuoso writing. It’s as if he had in mind the screen hero Errol Flynn, whose films Korngold had scored, music on which he drew for this concerto. There’s a tangible frisson between the soloist and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic under Alexander Shelley, who are on their collective toes throughout, not least in the fireworks of the finale. The more intimate passages are beautifully realised between them too, such as the nocturnal misterioso in the slow movement.

In the songs, Sting’s burnished rock style contrasts with the debonair voice of Max Raabe in ‘Speak low’, while the quintet from the Deutsches Kammerorchester Berlin serenade us, grand-hotel style, in the Waxman and Jurmann/Kaper pieces. The angst in ‘Menuchims Lied’ by Eric Zeisl reflects one composer who found Hollywood not heaven but hell, unlike the happier instance of Rózsa, who enjoyed huge commercial success with his music for Ben-Hur, El Cid and Spellbound, all of them idiomatically arranged by Paul Bateman. Hope’s payoff is a somewhat inconclusive ‘As time goes by’, beginning tentatively and ending mid-air.