The 19-year-old Constant Lambert’s assured, compact and at times heart-stoppingly beautiful 1924 Piano Concerto (realised from the two-piano short score by Giles Easterbrook and the late Edward Shipley – and not to be confused with this figure’s harrowingly intense Concerto for piano and nine players of seven years later) struck me as a major find when I welcomed David Owen Norris’s enjoyable first recording of it. Now we have an arguably even more compelling display from the soloist who gave the work its world premiere in March 1988. Jonathan Plowright cuts a dash with his scintillating technique, opalescent tone and beguiling range of colour, and his partnership with David Lloyd-Jones and the English Northern Philharmonia generates a greater attack and thrust than its predecessor.

All five items on this disc were composed while Lambert was a student at the RCM. In his extensive annotation, Stephen Lloyd reveals that the 1924-25 ballet Romeo and Juliet began life as a ‘suite dansée’ entitled Adam and Eve, whose scenario had been suggested by fellow student, pianist Angus Morrison. Eager to write a score for Diaghilev, William Walton took Lambert along for a meeting with the impresario in November 1925. In the event Walton missed out; Diaghilev was instantly taken with Adam and Eve, promptly renaming it and staging it the following May in Monte Carlo. It’s a spry, witty and astonishingly polished achievement for one so young (Lambert had clearly thoroughly absorbed his Stravinsky, Poulenc, Satie and Milhaud), and Lloyd-Jones’s performance combines keen discipline, rhythmic point and the whiff of greasepaint to an even more convincing degree than either the late, lamented John Lanchbery’s or Norman Del Mar’s (Lyrita, 1/80 – nla).

A strong Gallic flavour also permeates the comic one-act ballet Prize Fight (1924) and the overture The Bird Actors (1925; originally conceived for piano duet). Again Lloyd-Jones emerges victorious, unmatched for sheer effervescence and mischievous fun. Yet in some ways it’s the 1927 miniature Elegiac Blues that leaves the most enduring impression. Within days of the news of the early death of black singer Florence Mills, Lambert had written this touching tribute for solo piano; the orchestral version so sympathetically given here first heard in 1928.

A winner of a disc, this, captured with commendable projection and naturalness by producer Andrew Keener and engineer Phil Rowlands.