The most interesting music on this disc comes first. Selim Palmgren’s Second Piano Concerto (b1913) starts with a mysterious, almost inaudible throbbing, and when the piano enters it is shadowed by a faintly exotic-sounding celesta. Never entirely predictable as it wends its episodic, rather short-breathed yet always attractive, 23-minute way, the piece could equally well be titled ‘fantasy’ or ‘rhapsody’. It’s not entirely surprising that Friedman, for one, took it into his repertoire. In fact it describes the course of the Kokemäki River, in particular through the town of Pori, where the composer spent his youth. The chamber orchestra now located there pays the score the compliment of maximum care and attention, while Henri Sigfridsson brings flexible phrasing and some finely blended textures to the solo part, as well as full technical aptitude.

Palmgren’s five piano concertos span the central decades of his composing career. The First and Third confirm his indebtedness to the single-movement model of Liszt’s concertos; and while it is hard to not to smile at the genial quality of the themes, it is equally hard not to crave more resourceful working out. Even in the intermittently colourful ‘Metamorphoses’ of an Ostrobothnian melody that constitute the Third Concerto, it’s very much a case of business-as-usual in late-Romantic piano concerto land. Dramatic tension was never Palmgren’s forte, and neither was humour (think of the sport Dohnányi had with his nursery theme).

If Palmgren’s name rings a bell, it’s more like to be for his 300 or so musically undemanding piano miniatures than anything else, since these supplied reams of enjoyable material for generations of youngsters and amateurs. That talent certainly extended to the violin-and-piano repertoire, as the seven pieces that form his Op 48 here confirm. Here Sigfridsson is joined by Jan Söderblom, exchanging the conductor’s baton for some nimble and euphonious fiddling.