Lara Downes says ‘this music holds a nostalgia for another time in American music – a golden generation when concert music in America had a real and present place in the culture. Families listened to Live from the Met and watched Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts at Carnegie Hall.’ You can see what she means, looking back two or three generations later, and this attractive anthology can be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap.

It includes songs without words. The Broadway Bernstein is represented by one song from On the Town and two little-known examples – ‘In our time’, available only recently and never used, would surely have been a hit. Then there’s Barber’s catchy ‘Sure on this shining night’, which works well instrumentally with its antiphonal exchanges. His substantial early Cello Sonata, which has become a classic, gets an arresting performance, with Bailey’s magisterial tone ably matched by Downes. In contrast, Lukas Foss’s pieces are amusing. Then Bailey purloins Bernstein’s early Clarinet Sonata and turns it into an idiomatic cello piece. It works – might have been written that way.

The sequencing on the CD is neat – after Foss’s pieces we get Bernstein’s piano Anniversary for Foss; after Bernstein’s Anniversary for his influential friend Copland we get the latter’s arrangements of ‘Simple Gifts’, with a lingering ending, and ‘Long time ago’.