This lavishly packaged CD – a hardback book runs to some 80 pages in four languages with three separate background pieces and a filmography – brings together two suites from Rota’s most famous film scores plus a concertante piece for piano and orchestra which quotes from his film work.

There’s a seven-movement suite from La Strada (1954) directed by Fellini, with whom Rota collaborated more frequently than even Herrmann with Hitchcock. The brilliant opening sets the scene for the raffish charms of the film’s circus folk, depicted in colourful orchestration and with vibrant, tuneful music that conveys the atmosphere of life under the big top. His themes, both romantic and rhythmically infectious, are skillfully interwoven between movements, as when the brilliant opening music returns, lit against a ghostly backdrop of a snow scene (track 6), a transformation to relish.

Rota wrote the music for Il Gattopardo, (‘The Leopard’, 1963), before the film was shot. He probably knew that the set piece of Visconti’s film was to be a lavish ballroom sequence lasting more than an hour in the original print (which, incidentally, has been restored in the original colour rather than the ‘de luxe color’ version foisted on it by 20th Century Fox). The sequence begins with a previously unpublished waltz by Verdi, which at the time was in Visconti’s private collection, and continues in a manner akin to Verdi’s own ballet music.

Visconti had wanted the music to give the impression of ‘a modest ensemble hired for the occasion’ and this is just the treatment it receives from the Granada City Orchestra under Josep Pons. Nothing is inflated or allowed to disturb the seamless flow of this delightful dance music.

Proportion and balance are just right, too, for the modest and endearing Concerto soirée in which the fetching piano writing, very much the centre of attention, is brilliantly performed by Benedetto Lupo and wittily executed by the orchestra. A most attractive disc.