Mark Bebbington is fast becoming the Iris Loveridge de nos jours with his championship of neglected British piano music. There is, though, the danger of a certain anonymity about these good-but-not-great composers. Cases in point are these three concertos for piano and strings, two by British composers, one by a colonial interloper. Heard blind it would be hard to tell Jacobs, Williamson and Carwithen apart, especially when all are written for the same forces.

Recorded in the palpably empty CBSO Centre with a well-judged piano-and-orchestra balance and a lovely warm depth to the strings, the disc opens with the first commercial recording of Gordon Jacob’s Concerto No 1, premiered in 1927 by Sir Henry Wood and its dedicatee Arthur Benjamin. Impressionistic at times, surprisingly astringent at others, its three short movements make an attractive work redolent of the period, as is the longest (33'28") of the three concertos here, that by Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003) from two decades later. A composition pupil of William Alwyn, whose second wife she became, and probably the only composer with her Christian name, Carwithen is not a memorable melodist. She reflects the period of post-war austerity rather well, her unsmiling material more likely to rouse admiration for her craftsmanship.

By contrast, and in between these two, comes Malcolm Williamson’s Concerto No 2 in F sharp minor, written in just eight days in 1960 and described by the composer as ‘an overtly Australian work aiming at spontaneity and vigour rather than profundity’. This is certainly true of the two frolicsome outer movements, the latter’s exuberant jazz-inflected main subject putting one in mind of Malcolm Arnold, but it is the sombre, dissonant central movement that is most affecting, one of the highlights of this crusading disc with its excellent booklet.