Composer, pianist and author: Peter Dickinson has enjoyed a long and successful career in all three fields and it is good to see his own music coming to the fore – this disc being one of six that Heritage made available for his 80th birthday (last November). Despite their relative succinctness (each of them lasting around 20 minutes), these three concertos exemplify the resourceful and subtle interplay between ‘popular’ and ‘art’ music which has long been central to his thinking.

In the Organ Concerto (1971), a blues-inflected setting of a Byron poem underlies music that builds to an intensive climax before subsiding into a silence the more telling given the highly variegated textures that had prevailed. Jennifer Bate gives an assured reading, as does Howard Shelley of the Piano Concerto (1979 84) written for him and which takes the formal trajectory of the earlier work on to another level with its intricate and often confrontational dialogue. This takes in a scintillating cadenza then sees an upright piano emerge within the orchestra with its own ragtime idea, so bringing about the seismic culmination prior to a magical evanescence.

The newly recorded Violin Concerto (1986) is a memorial to Ralph Holmes, whose artistry informs its greater restraint and inwardness of content with its deft allusions to Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, and from which a nominally classical four-movement structure can be discerned. Chloë Hanslip has the full measure of this pivoting between virtuosity and rumination, while Clark Rundell is alive to the orchestral writing both here and in the overture-like Merseyside Echoes (1986), with its engaging evocation of the Merseybeat sound exemplified by The Beatles. Detailed notes from the composer further enhance this absorbing and highly recommendable release.