Before specialising as a conductor, Leonard Slatkin studied composition with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in Los Angeles, and he has remained active as a composer alongside his other activities. The Raven, a work for orchestra and narrator based on writings by Edgar Allan Poe, was composed while Slatkin was working as assistant conductor at the St Louis Symphony Orchestra. It was written with Vincent Price in mind, the actor being a St Louis native, and Price gave the first performance in 1971. The five movements are imaginatively scored and superbly atmospheric, and it’s easy to imagine how Price’s voice would have sounded when listening, although Alec Baldwin, the narrator here, successfully brings his own personality to the reading.

Composed in 2014, Endgames is a concertino grosso composed for strings and six instruments that are less frequently heard in a solo capacity, namely piccolo, alto flute, cor anglais, E flat clarinet, bass clarinet and contrabassoon. The work features three short movements played without a break, the slow central one featuring writing for the solo instruments of considerable grace and melodic appeal.

Kinah was composed in 2015 as a tribute to Slatkin’s parents, the violinist Felix Slatkin and cellist Eleanor Aller, both founder members of the Hollywood String Quartet. Scored for strings, brass, piano and metal percussion, there are brief references to the slow movement of Brahms’s Double Concerto, which his parents were due to perform in 1963 but which was prevented by Felix’s sudden death at the age of 47. In this premiere performance of the work, Slatkin’s brother Frederick Zlotkin plays the work’s solo cello part on the instrument that was owned by Eleanor.

Slatkin’s son Daniel is also a composer and the programme includes his short orchestral work In Fields, a warm and contemplative piece first performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 2018. In addition, the collection also features three light-music arrangements by Felix Slatkin, two of which were lost and have been reconstructed from recordings by Slatkin’s wife Cindy McTee. We also get to hear Felix Slatkin playing an arrangement of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No 17 recorded in 1944, and Eleanor Aller playing an abridged version of Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 2 in 1946. The latter was arranged and conducted by Erich Wolfgang Korngold for the soundtrack of the film Deception and the track captures his voice counting beats at the start. Altogether, it’s an intriguing collection, and the recording of the modern pieces is of superlative quality.