Here’s an interesting prospect: three British (sort of) piano concertos, each from a different 20th-century decade, each offering different escape routes from those epic 19th-century boxing matches between a piano virtuoso and the orchestra…
“The album begins with Walton’s early Sinfonia Concertante, heard in its 1943 revision… Hammond and orchestra (the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by George Vass) secure bigger rewards in the chiselled exchanges of the Britten, written for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. Tippett’s hothouse effusions suit them too…”
