The Spivakovsky is a particularly engaging work, with a catchy tune in the first movement (much like a Leroy Anderson encore), another semi-pop romantic melody for its centre-piece and an infectious moto perpetuo finale. Tommy Reilly plays it superbly. Not surprisingly the Malcolm Arnold work, one of this composer's best miniature concertos, written in 1954 for the BBC Proms, is very appealing too. The music is exuberantly melodic in the manner of the English Dances-Arnold was a happier man then and could conjure up brass whoops with confident panache-the orchestra most effectively scored (minus woodwind) to give the soloist a strong, reedy profile. The Mesto centre-piece excludes strings; it is unexpectedly dirge-like, with dark brass sonorities and percussion providing a sombre accompaniment. The mood lightens wittily and irrepressibly in the spirited Con brio finale, which has another unforgettable swinging melody floating over a rocking bass rhythm.
The Villa-Lobos, written in 1955, deserves to be much better known. Scored for a small orchestra of strings, single wind, harp, celesta and percussion, it has a neo-classical opening movement which is pastoral in feeling, then produces a quite beautiful melody for the Andante. The finale, which moves along at a modestly good-humoured pace, has a few piquant hints of the composer's usual Brazilian geography. Nevertheless, overall this is a comparatively unjocular piece. In the last movement Reilly effectively substitutes his own fairly lengthy cadenza for the composer's original.
James Moody's A Spanish fantasy draws on picture-postcard Spain and offers the soloist a chance to demonstrate his easy bravura. Farnon's characteristically nostalgic Prelude and Dance (a light-hearted yet bittersweet waltz) interweaves both its themes felicitously and calls for more virtuosity and dash, plus a ready response to quicksilver changes of mood. These Reilly takes in his stride: he really is a remarkably musical player. The recording balance is surely as near perfect as one could wish: the harmonica has seldom, if ever, been so well caught on disc, nicely focused with just the right degree of plangent bite.'