In an absorbing album of music written since the turn of the century, Paul Reale displays his Prospero-like command of sound and imagination. So many of his ideas are so excellent you wonder why no other composer ever thought of them before, like assigning different solo string instruments for each movement of his Concerto grosso, which itself is a brilliant baroque-minded take on the Romantic colourist composers. Reale draws on the past of American music in his earnest, consoling homage to Samuel Barber, American Elegy, played twice, the second time in his 2018 version with chimes – annoying at first, although towards the end it seemed ritualistically right.

Reale’s confection for Halloween, Hextet, begins with a ‘Tarantella’ through which a ‘Greensleeves’ tune runs, interrupted by angular outbursts. Although the composer claims in his booklet notes that his ‘Zombies’ movement is ‘creepy’, it is actually lovely, featuring an exquisite cello solo. A hymn emerges halfway through ‘Walpurgisnacht’. ‘I like to think of it as a sound movie’, writes Reale. In the same general vein, Reale’s surrealistic cornucopia of sounds, Dancer’s Dream, climaxes magically in many different directions at the same time.

His Piano Concerto No 3, Caldera with Ice Cave, is full of musical wonder at the natural wonders of northern New Mexico. Although it opens as if it were going to be the greatest Romantic piano concerto of all time, it proceeds born out of admiration for Harold in Italy and Don Quixote. Reale’s use of a piano trio in the the ‘Fire’ movement recalls the Concerto Dies irae he wrote for the Mirecourt Trio 40 years earlier.