Emily Pailthorpe is a young prize-winning oboist, trained at the Juilliard School in New York, who plays with an exceptionally sweet and pure tone. Here she offers three British oboe concertos, the first of which, by Paul Patterson, was commissioned for her. Before writing it, Patterson asked Emily to improvise for him, and it was her playing then that led him to think of a work inspired by the phoenix, the firebird that rises from the ashes. Pailthorpe herself feels that her improvising is ‘exotic and bird-like’, mirroring that same idea: hence the title Phoenix, which is also the title of the disc.

The first movement starts with a cadenza for the soloist and then launches into a jaunty Allegro in an attractive tonal idiom. A brief pause introduces the second movement, marked Tranquillo, which allows the soloist to weave vaguely oriental ideas, as though in improvisation. The finale is a dashing movement full of syncopations and changes of rhythm, again most attractive. The Vaughan Williams Concerto, also for oboe and strings, was originally written in 1944 for the great oboist Leon Goossens and has become central to the oboist’s repertory, beautifully written for the instrument. The first movement, entitled Rondo pastorale, takes us close to the world of RVW’s The Lark Ascending, while including a sharply pointed middle section. The second movement is described as a Minuet and Musette, leading to a scherzo-like finale, with another pastoral section before the fast coda and sudden gentle close.

The Howells work is an arrangement for oboe, harp and strings of Howells’s Oboe Sonata, written in 1942 but left in manuscript until discovered among the composer’s papers at his death. Pailthorpe felt with some justice that it would work better with string rather than piano accompaniment, and that is why she got Benjamin Wallfisch, conductor of the English Chamber Orchestra on the disc, to make this arrangement.

Though the first of the four brief movements seems to stop and start rather too much, the rest is a delight, a warmly lyrical slow movement followed by an Allegro scherzando with prominent harp-writing and a final gentle epilogue, leading to a tranquil pianissimo close. As well as Pailthorpe’s fine playing, it is good to have the ECO in splendid form under Benjamin Wallfisch, recorded with fine definition and clarity.