Much of what Tobias Picker does sounds and feels familiar. It’s the attitude that begins to make the difference. In Keys to the City – his 1982 centennial tribute to the Brooklyn Bridge – the piece is held taut (a bit like the bridge’s steel cabling) by a series of interlocking 12-tone rows. But they’re catchy tone rows – that’s the difference. They strive to engage. Attitude, you see.

As soon as you establish that Keys to the City is a rhapsodic single-movement piano concerto, you’re thinking ‘Gershwin’. I’m thinking the opening of Woody Allen’s Manhattan but in particular of the editing, the way Rhapsody in Blue underscores a series of familiar images seen from different angles and perspectives. Picker’s Keys is a little like that. It’s cinematically cross-cut to suggest the passage of time altering our perceptions. And while the spirit if not the colour of Gershwin may rule (not so blue this time around), the jazziness is all Picker’s. The release comes with a voracious boogie-woogie cadenza which might have been handed down from the ‘Masque’ in Bernstein’s Age of Anxiety. The excellent pianist, Jeremy Denk, could go around the block again with that but Picker has other ideas: namely a drifting, nostalgic chorale (a little redolent of Milhaud’s Création du monde) building to a grandiose wide-shot of the bridge. The piano pay-off finally comes clean about the debt to Gershwin.

Generally speaking, Picker’s pieces are the sum of their best parts. He’s noticeably better at the lyric than he is at the dramatic – witness the central movement of And Suddenly It’s Evening (1994) which abruptly turns what is essentially a concerto for orchestra into a concerto for violin. Picker spins out his most verdant melodic counterpoint for the occasion, every line free and melismatic in a way that is distinctive if not individual in the way that, say, Tippett’s music (which it calls to mind) is. Even so, this seven-minute movement is easily the best music on the disc and very seductively played by the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra under Kurt Sanderling’s son Thomas.

The Cello Concerto (1999) was commissioned by the BBC and premièred by Paul Watkins at the 2001 Proms. Its outer movements are songful, even operatic, in ways that one might expect of a cello concerto. I like particularly the way the cello’s sonorous, big-hearted character is reflected in the orchestra. But just when you think it’s going to be plain-sailing to the Elgarian sunset, Picker interpolates two unsettling scherzos. They could have been more unsettling. I’m wondering how much more effective the piece might have been had he played up the antagonism of the second movement (‘Brief Journey’) and built upon its most arresting idea – that in which a piano sounds hell-bent on hijacking the concerto.

As an opera composer of some note (I can only speak for Emmeline, not the more recent Thérèse Raquin – on Chandos, 10/02 – which shares a theme with this Concerto) Picker might be expected to live more dangerously with the dramatic narrative than he does. Perhaps late middle-age will find him less benevolent.