Dutton’s disc (with its two premiere recordings) is already the second recording released this year devoted entirely to the music of Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877-1952). It makes one wonder anew what would have happened if the composer had escaped the penurious life he suffered, shuffling from one European country to the next, and made for Hollywood, where his talents as a tunesmith and orchestral craftsman would surely have borne fruit and brought him the recognition he deserved.

One could hardly describe his Violin Concerto of 1922 as an adventurous, innovative masterpiece of breathtaking originality. It uses the musical language of half a century earlier and relies on techniques familiar from the concertos of Tchaikovsky, Glazunov, Arensky and others for its lifeblood (though I wonder, listening to the last movement, if Bortkiewicz had not heard Korngold’s incidental music for Much Ado About Nothing, premiered in Vienna in 1920). Get past that hurdle, however, and you have a substantial three-movement work lasting 50 minutes of instant appeal and immense charm. Could I have wished for a heavier tone more forwardly projected from Sergey Levitin in the two outer movements? Yes. But how beautifully he shapes and sings the lovely second movement, entitled ‘Poème’.

A symphonic poem follows. Bortkiewicz’s Op 19, composed in 1914, follows the trajectory of Shakespeare’s Othello and the model of one of Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems (Romeo and Juliet perhaps): virile, martial motifs for Othello, an insidious theme for Iago (a distant relative of Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel) and a lusciously romantic one for Desdemona. It’s a highly effective concert piece, much more so than Dvořák’s limp essay on the same subject. The Scottish players under the indefatigable Martin Yates play as if the music has been in their repertoire for years. The disc lasts a generous 80'46" and comes with an excellent booklet-note by Guy Rickards.