If you want to read a glowing review of at least one work on this disc, you can do so in the form of the composer’s own booklet note. Vito Palumbo signs off with the conclusion that his Recorder Concerto is a piece in which ‘a very deep meaning [is] hidden in very note’ and which ‘reveals the devastating hideousness of our time’.

I wonder how Bach and Shostakovich would react to that summation of the early 2000s, given one saw countless family members die of everyday disease and the other lived under a dictatorship. Respectively, those figures exercise a significant influence over Palumbo’s concertos for harpsichord, Concerto Barocco (2006), and cello (2007). The former ‘re appropriates’ harmonic, melodic and rhythmic tools used by Bach and Vivaldi. It’s a tight, idiosyncratic pastiche with one eyebrow raised. Palumbo’s Baroque in-jokes don’t disrupt the fun and motoric momentum but it sounds like that same momentum has him by the goolies.

The Cello Concerto is another inward-looking experiment, this based on using ‘only tonal or modal material’ (not quite such a challenge, surely). In the syrupy slow movement, Hollywood-style button-pushing lets the cat out of the bag and it’s not long before you start to notice the same formulaic, borrowed gestures in the spiky, Shostakovich-inspired outer movements too. As in Concerto Barocco, harmonic sequencing gets Palumbo out of cul-de-sacs a little too often; when a pregnant textural counterpoint emerges at 4'30" in the finale it lasts all of nine seconds.

While I can’t decipher the ‘hidden meaning in every note’ the composer describes, I do feel the Recorder Concerto is the most interesting piece here even if it drifts into inane avian tweeting too often (name me a contemporary recorder concerto that doesn’t). There is some meat here for Jaime Martín’s Gävle Symphony Orchestra and the locked-in discourse that emerges in the eighth minute (there are three movements on a single track) is just what we were lacking in the Cello Concerto. That is one example of musical material proving as strong and/or interesting as the textures in which it has been clothed, and not having been cherry-picked from music history. There is another at the very end of the slow movement. As both a critic and a general listener, I wish there were more.