The title’s stretching it a bit with the inclusion of Ernst Widmer, who became a naturalised Brazilian at the age of 33 and spent the remaining 30 years of his life in Salvador de Bahia. He completed this Piano Concerto two years before his death in 1990, and its polyrhythms and rainsticks invite a Deliciae Brasiliensis subtitle rather than Honegger’s more sober alternative in his Fourth Symphony. ‘A parade of tropical street musicians whose infectious rhythms have emerged through a modernist vortex’, according to the stylish and persuasive notes by Chris Walton, and there’s plenty of Widmer hitherto unrecorded, but one hears why: the Bartókian snap of the piano part doesn’t conceal its limited gestural spans and earnest fusion of idioms; head to head, the drum cadenzas in the finale wouldn’t last the first round with Revueltas and La noche de los Mayas. Maybe you can take the composer out of Switzerland, but not…

The Partita by Adolf Brunner is another first recording, and a second, harder-edged, more rhythmically extrovert and less distantly recorded, might make a stronger case for a two-movement exercise of expanded neo-classicism. Or it might not.

Bookending this curio are early and late works by Othmar Schoeck, but in reverse order. The Festlicher Hymnus lives up to its Straussian name and can enthusiastically be recommended to all lovers of bombast. The concert overture William Ratcliff may not come near to portraying the psychological, not to say psychopathic torment of its eponymous hero after Heine’s play but I like Schoeck’s transformation of a lick from The Barber of Seville into a portentous theme and his cogent, Manfred-like movement between Ratcliff’s theme and more hopeful material presumably characterising Maria, the girl who twice rejects him and is eventually stabbed to death for her pains. In Schoeck’s hands it’s full-blooded fun and done in the grand manner by the RSNO and the Swiss conductor for the sessions.