There are novelties and first recordings here, all masterminded by Philip Lane whose sterling service to film composers continues unabated. Lambert’s two film scores from the 1940s show him adapting for the cinema without the sparkle of his earlier works such as The Rio Grande. Merchant Seamen is already known and recorded but the suite Lane has now arranged from Anna Karenina makes a substantial half-hour. The forlana that accompanies Anna and Vronsky in Venice is the catchiest tune but we hear it only once. Otherwise the score is attractive if at times routine, enlarging the picture of Lambert’s declining years.

Berners and Lambert were good friends and go well together. Lane has orchestrated two numbers from Champagne Charlie – the Polka and the music-hall song “Come on Algernon”, of which there are three recordings in the voice-and-piano version. It’s enticingly sung here by Mary Carewe. The suite from Nicholas Nickleby, arranged and orchestrated by Ernest Irving, who brought many of the finest British composers into the cinema, is an effective sequence of character vignettes.

But the real discovery is the suite from The Halfway House, a wartime story involving the supernatural. It includes the “Valse” in an elegantly Chopinesque style that Berners wrote to accompany a spooky séance. It was played on the piano in the film and Lane has now scored it: the longer piano version is recorded. Berners, too, was influenced by the cinematic demands of the period but The Halfway House makes a delightful suite, complete with choral peroration, that ought to find a place in the concert hall. Sympathetic performances throughout in a generous 80-minute CD.