This grab-bag programme of works by William Grant Still (1895-1978) spans most of the composer’s long and distinguished career. His American Suite (c1918), for instance, comes from his days as an undergraduate at Wilberforce University in Ohio. Cast in three brief movements, it’s largely built from tunes clearly meant to evoke Native American music. The final ‘Lament’ is by far the most individual, with an atmospheric introduction that sets a nocturnal scene right out of a bel canto opera.

Everything here is, in some sense, a miniature. The Fanfare for the 99th Fighter Squadron (1945) – in honour of the 992 black Tuskegee Airmen who fought for the US in the Second World War – lasts less than a minute. Can’t You Line ’Em (1940) is an oddly bright, four-minute-long fantasy on a prison work song (online you can find a 1936 field recording by James Wilson from a Virginia penitentiary that puts the song in its grim context). Summerland (1936), an arrangement of the second of three Visions for solo piano, is a little charmer marked by piquant harmonies. And the sombre Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius (1965), with its unexpected echoes of African American Spirituals, is from Still’s last decade.

Despite their occasional felicities, none of the aforementioned works are from the composer’s top drawer. Pastorela (1946), on the other hand, ‘a tone picture of a California landscape’, is rhapsodic, colourfully scored (Still worked in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and it shows), subtly inflected here and there with jazzy harmonies (as at 4'05"), and packs quite a lot of incident into 12 mintues, including a surprisingly dramatic turn near the end. The Violin Suite (1943) is also inspired by three images in the 1940 book The Negro in Art. Try the bluesy, swaying bit in the middle of the opening movement, ‘African Dancer’, or the Grappelli-like flights of fancy in the finale, ‘Gamin’, although the prize is the gorgeous ‘Mother and Child’ at the suite’s centre, with its undulating, sing-songy melody.

The Pastorela has been recorded previously, most notably in a white-hot 1946 performance by violinist Louis Kaufman (the work’s dedicatee), with Bernard Herrmann conducting (Cambria). But while the Violin Suite has been recorded in its original version for violin and piano (as has the Pastorela) – including superb renditions by Rachel Barton Pine (Cedille, 2/19) and Randall Goosby (Decca, 8/21) – I’m grateful to have heard the orchestral version. Zina Schiff is a fine player, although the close microphone placement can make her tone seem strident, and the RSNO, led by Schiff’s daughter Avlana Eisenberg, sound under-rehearsed and more than a bit stodgy. Nevertheless, this is a worthwhile addition to Still’s discography.