In 1966 Henri Lazarof made an impact with his prize-winning orchestral Structures Sonores; in the early ’70s James Galway recorded two works and John Ogdon one; and the composer himself has often conducted his own works. Latterly he has benefited from the advocacy of Gerard Schwarz, as in all the works here, which were written between 1985 and 1990. Lazarof was born in Bulgaria but his later studies were in Jerusalem, Rome and New York before he settled in California. This cosmopolitan background shows in a rich, Expressionist idiom derived from Berg.

The half-hour Tableaux (after Kandinsky) follows in the tradition of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition or Gunther Schuller’s Studies on Themes of Paul Klee and is a worthy successor. With the support of the Seattle Symphony, which commissioned Tableaux, Lazarof went to Europe to see Kandinsky paintings. The work’s nine sections show an original approach to the medium of piano and orchestra characterised by soft music thrown into sharp relief by loud eruptions. These juxtapositions may be related to Kandinsky’s notion of inner and outer elements in art with the former as ‘the soul of the artist’. The first and last tableaux are for solo piano and there are magical retreats to a rapt inner world after the fourth and sixth tableaux – all admirably delivered by Ohlsson.

The three-movement Violin Concerto is also unconventional, starting with an extended aria with an unaccompanied solo early on, and an epilogue ending softly on a sustained high note. There’s another slow ending to the compact two-movement Second Symphony – even though he has a superb command of the orchestra Lazarof never plays to the gallery. The lasting impression is of his unusually fluent command of sumptuous sounds, harmonically controlled, well represented in these recordings which ought to bring the composer more admirers.