All but three of the dozen items for solo instruments and string orchestra that make up this diverting programme from the Chamber Ensemble of London and its leader/director Peter Fisher are receiving their first recordings. The most nourishing inspiration here is to be found in the piano concertante offering by Finzi that lends the album its title. Margaret Fingerhut handles the solo part beautifully in a most pleasing performance that combines expressive fibre and poetic grace. Clarinettist Peter Cigleris makes an eloquent case for the engaging single-movement Concertante from 1948 by the much-loved Austrian-born British composer Joseph Horovitz (who died earlier this year aged 95), and he also excels in Cecilia McDowall’s hauntingly evocative Y Deryn Pur (‘The Gentle Dove’, originally for oboe quartet and commissioned by the 2007 Presteigne Festival). We can thank Cigleris, too, for the idiomatic arrangement of the pretty Frensham Pond by William Lloyd Webber (one of his six Country Impressions from 1960 for solo wind instruments and piano). Likewise, Ronald Binge’s fragrant miniature The Watermill casts an intoxicating spell (its oboe melody as inedible an earworm as you could imagine), while Robin Milford’s cheeky Mr John Peel Passes By proves to be a pithy morsel, clocking in at just shy of two minutes.

Elsewhere, Alan Ridout is represented by a Concertino for flute and strings, one in a series of eight for solo instruments and strings composed between 1974 and 1979; Judith Hall does this notably compact and communicative piece proud. Harpist Gabriella Dall’Olio lends uncommonly deft advocacy to the ingratiating Romance from the Concertino by Devon-born Elias Parish Alvars (1808-49), a fascinating figure lauded by (among others) Berlioz and Liszt as a leading exponent of that instrument. Two offerings by Clive Jenkins (another Devonian, born in 1938) top and tail proceedings, both given by their dedicatees: Fingerhut has a ball in the engagingly frothy Piano Concertino from 2018, while Michael Stowe was the lucky recipient of the even more recent (2021) Three Pieces for oboe and strings. And I mustn’t forget nonagenarian Don Shearman, who chips in with two movements (the charming ‘Venice in the Rain’ and playful ‘Seventeen Going On Eighteen’) from a suite entitled Eine kleine Leichtmusik that he wrote for Peter Fisher.

Unfailingly sympathetic music-making throughout, then, realistically captured by Michael Ponder’s microphones. First-rate annotation, too, by Robert Matthew-Walker. If the concept appeals, don’t hesitate.