When Bruce Levingston was invited to give a recital for the opening of the Civil Rights museum in his home state of Mississippi, he put together a programme of works purporting to reflect issues of patriotism, citizenship and human rights that seem more contentious and polarising than ever.

It’s a strong concept on paper and in theory. Yet do these piano pieces transcend their programmatic basis in purely musical terms? Not always. For example, Nolan Gasser’s American Citizen claims to draw conceptual inspiration from Marie Hull’s painting of John Wesley Washington and musical inspiration from sources as eclectic as Stephen Foster tunes, ragtime, bebop, blues and Chopin fiorituras. What comes out in the wash, however, is rhapsodic patchwork in the manner of Charles Ives. Yet the neo-Impressionistic harmonic language of William Grant Still’s Summerland is handled with careful textural deployment and narrative beauty. The music also inspires some of Levingston’s most sensitive and polished playing on disc.

In David T Little’s suite Annunciation of Purpose, I’m intrigued by the ‘Ride’ movement’s percussive high-register clusters set against sustained bass lines, and by the hushed Morton Feldman-like quality of the brief ‘Reveille’ interludes. The austere and understated lyricism in the outer movements of Augusta Gross’s Locations in Time are more to my taste than the central Elegy’s somewhat saccharine melodic invention. The two C Price Walden pieces are serious and well crafted, with plenty of pillar-like declamatory gestures that (intentionally or not) evoke similar moments in Aaron Copland and Roy Harris. Walden’s arrangement of Amazing Grace stands out for its gently spread-out bass lines and piquant dissonances. But did Walden write in those dynamic hairpins and ritards at phrase ends, or is that Levingston’s doing? I find that these gestures reduce his arrangement’s innate gravitas to salon dimensions.

In any case, Levingston’s rhetorical underlining throughout the three Chopin Mazurkas crosses that thin line demarcating subjectivity and fussy mannerism. He stretches the A minor Mazurka (Op 17 No 4) out to shapeless and clueless (dis)-proportions in six record-breaking minutes: a far cry from Horowitz’s controlled rubato or Paderewski’s surprisingly straightforward delivery. Once again, Levingston proves that he plays new music much better than he interprets 19th-century Romantics.