Despite the implausible name of the booklet writer, C Content, I am not at all happy with the rudimentary liner-notes on the music. For background on these obscure works, here receiving their world premiere recordings, we need to be told rather more than that ‘from 1811 to 1813, Hérold gets down to writing the four concertos for piano and orchestra. In this respect Hérold is the first French composer to write for the pianoforte in his country. These four concertos form a whole, of which the last chord of the Fourth Concerto constitutes the outcome…Bernard Boetto has done work of “musical palaeographer” while presenting us a quite legible material.’ The manuscripts were discovered in the National Library of Paris; my guess is that the works were written in Italy after Hérold had won the Grand Prix de Rome.

Hérold, remembered today for his overture to Zampa and the ballet La fille mal gardé (its best-known number, the Clog Dance, added later by an obscure German composer called Peter Hertel), was primarily an opera and ballet composer. Judging by these early concertos, it was a wise career move. Not that they are terrible. They are just terribly humdrum, watered-down Cramer and Clementi – and that’s saying something – with a faded, tinkly music-box charm. Concertos Nos 1 and 4 have but two movements, the former being in E major, one of a very small number of piano concertos written in the key up to that time. Concerto No 3 in A major is arguably the most individual of the four, its second movement a duet for piano and violin, its third a pleasantly catchy rondo.

All might have fared better had the orchestra been galvanised into action by the conductor (‘he has gained tremendous popularity with orchestras for the professional manner in which he rehearses and performs’) or inspired by a musician who no doubt is an able accompanist and chamber musician but no concerto soloist. These works need someone of the stature of Howard Shelley to show them in their best light rather than a dimly flickering lantern.