Stravinsky once described the piano as the ‘fulcrum’ of his compositional activity, presumably meaning that he used it to lever ideas into action. This record of his music for piano and orchestra is, however, best taken as light music. The opening and closing pieces are, of course, trivia, a rather plain setting of the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’ dating from 1917 and a one-minute canon on the final melody in The Firebird written for Pierre Monteux. The Concerto in D, for strings, is a pleasant divertimento, its central Arioso reminding us how much Stravinsky admired Tchaikovsky.

Of the three works for piano and orchestra, the most severe is the Concerto for Piano and Wind, written in 1923 24 when Stravinsky was embarking upon his most neo-classical phase. It places huge demands on soloist, surely conductor, and also recording engineers, all of whom sail through unscathed by the technical problems and the difficult sonorities (full woodwind and brass, no strings apart from double basses). The Capriccio is, as its name implies, a work written to beguile, which it does, and would benefit from an altogether more light-hearted approach than the extremely efficient Steven Osborne gives it. His technique is up to all the demands placed upon him, including the very difficult Movements, written in 1958 59 as Stravinsky was entering Webern-like waters, and approaching Boulez in complexity. No one can possibly hear how the maths all works out but that does not matter: Stravinsky had a much better ear than most, certainly than the more rigorous serialists of the day (the 1950s). In fact, the five short movements can sound – how Stravinsky would have hated the word! – rather pretty.