Scarcely a month passes, it seems, without a new release from John Wilson. Whether in the role of sorcerer, illuminating the scores of established masterpieces, or of alchemist (as here), turning unfamiliar music by a second-division composer into gold, he has the Midas touch. And Edward MacDowell, that most European-sounding of American composers, deserves the innate stylistic understanding of genre that Wilson brings to the podium.

Who has ever heard (of) MacDowell’s symphonic tone poem Lancelot und Elaine (note the ‘und’) and, after hearing it, asked why it is not in the regular repertoire? (Not that symphonic tone poems by any composer are regularly programmed these days.) Based on Tennyson’s poetic cycle Idylls of the King, with Wagnerian leitmotifs representing the doomed (unrequited) lovers and, like all his generation, inescapably influenced by Liszt’s pioneering essays, MacDowell’s ‘Second Symphonic Poem’ received its first US performance under the baton of Arthur Nikisch, no less.

Following that comes the Piano Concerto No 1 in A minor, the lesser of MacDowell’s two piano concertos (the D minor is a masterpiece of its kind). Many older readers will have grown up with the magnificent 1962 recording of both by Eugene List with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra and Carlos Chávez. There have been several notable accounts of the two concertos since then, foremost among them Donna Amato (with the LPO and Paul Freeman – Olympia) in 1985, Stephen Prutsman (less compelling) with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland under Arthur Fagen (Naxos, 2/01) and Seta Tanyel with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra with Martyn Brabbins (Hyperion, 6/01). The latter is superbly recorded, with a finely judged balance between piano and orchestra. Detail in both departments is exemplary. Tempo-wise, however, every movement is slightly undercooked. Xiayin Wang is certainly not that, seizing the solo part by the scruff of the neck, though making one all too aware of the boisterously rhetorical character of the first movement (its lead subject returning quite a bit too often); the slow movement is a soothing lullaby, the finale a breathless romp in the company of Saint-Saëns, Litolff, Anton Rubinstein and, most obviously, Grieg. It is taken at a true presto (7'10" compared with Tanyel’s 8'25"). Sometimes clarity is sacrificed for speed and the piano rather bullied by the orchestra, but it’s thrilling stuff if you like your piano concertos bravura and romantic.

The album continues with two brief orchestral fragments from MacDowell’s abandoned programmatic symphony based on The Song of Roland, and Victor Herbert’s arrangement of ‘To a Wild Rose’, at two pages long by far and away the composer’s most popular piece, once in the piano stool of every house in the land. It ends with Lamia, a ‘Third Symphonic Poem’ (1887 88) inspired by Keats’s eponymous poem of 1820. Wilson and his players revel in the drama and lush orchestration of this ‘Wagnerish’ (MacDowell) essay. High-profile champions and a vivid recording may just be enough to persuade promoters to let us hear it played in an actual live concert.