This Oehms two-disc set from the pianist Pascal Rogé, who turned 70 this spring, combines the Ravel G major and Gershwin Concertos, recorded and released in 2004, with Gershwin’s Rhapsody and Ravel’s Left-Hand Concerto, recorded in 2006-07. His collaborators are the Vienna Radio SO under Bertrand de Billy, who on their own contribute An American in Paris.

Born in Paris to a musical family, Rogé studied at the Conservatoire with Lucette Descaves, who also taught Engerer, Pennetier, Thibaudet and the Labèques. He later worked with Julius Katchen and Nadia Boulanger. A laureate of the Marguerite Long Competition, Rogé started touring at 17 and began a fruitful recording career that would eventually encompass all the piano works of Poulenc, Ravel and Satie and the concertos of Saint-Saëns.

Rogé seems very much at home in the Ravel concertos. The alternating fizz and languor of the G major Concerto’s opening movement provides the perfect set-up for the Adagio assai, its sweet delicacy delivered in a dreamlike aura over expert support by the winds. Rogé tosses off the swirling figurations and repeated-note passages of the piquant Presto finale with admirable clarity. Most striking in the Left-Hand Concerto is Rogé’s vivid delineation of Ravel’s shifting affects and ease with the sometimes tricky transitions.

It’s no surprise that de Billy and the Vienna Radio SO, who have devoted annual festivals to American music, display a solid idiomatic grasp of Gershwin. The blend of insouciance and sentiment in An American in Paris is pleasingly apt. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Rogé’s approach to either the Rhapsody or the Concerto. Though these pieces will soon be a century old, there is vast contemporary recorded evidence of the stylistic milieu from which they emerged. The Concerto’s oddly sentimental opening solo gets the entire movement off on the wrong affective foot. Later, the overblown coda of the Allegro agitato (6'30") collapses of its own weight. The enervated Rhapsody leaves one aching for some hint of sass and pizzazz. For sessions recorded two years apart, the sound on each of the discs is understandably disparate. Microphone placement for the soloist in the Rhapsody, however, seems strangely distant.