The bicentenary of William Vincent Wallace (1812-65) has drawn deserved attention to a neglected British composer. A new biography documents his pioneering travels as piano and violin virtuoso in Australia and South America, and Naxos has now added three CDs of his piano compositions to two on the Cala label as well as its own releases of the operas Maritana and Lurline.

This latest piano collection is perhaps the best of all, ranging from a simple waltz composed for soirées in Mexico in 1840-41 to much more ambitious – and highly taxing – virtuoso pieces composed in Britain and the US in the late 1840s and 1850s. The joyful, passionate Nocturne mélodique is especially winning, as is Au bord de la mer, but there’s much more to enjoy in this substantial and varied collection, which Rosemary Tuck dispatches all with admirable grace and aplomb. The comparison may be less with Liszt than with Thalberg but Wallace seems to me far more inventive than the latter. Perhaps most striking is the dazzling Grande Fantasie La Cracovienne, composed for New Orleans in 1842. Strongly evoking Gottschalk, it has become almost as much Miss Tuck’s calling card as it was Wallace’s. She has already recorded it for piano solo (Cala, 4/07) and now Jeremy Silver has convincingly recreated its original form with orchestral accompaniment.

Wallace’s piano compositions are of real appeal, and this generous and inexpensive collection is well worth investigating alongside Naxos’s previous issues of his Opera Fantasies and Celtic Fantasies.