When the Pittsburgh composer David Stock died last year, aged 76, he was celebrated for the hearty contributions he had made to the musical health of his city. He founded the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble in 1976 and wrote plenty of warm-spirited music for that group and for various ensembles at the local university (Duquesne) where he taught for many years. He often borrowed from jazz and traditional musics and he had a thing for jaunty titles (Earth Beat for timpani and winds? Sax Appeal for four saxophones?). His scores have a feel of being community-minded and unguarded if not especially radical – in the booklet-notes to this disc of three late ish concertos, Mark Yacovone writes that Stock ‘is not interested in gaining our attention through uncharted waters’, which is a generous way of describing music that openly relies on the familiar, the clichéd and the comfortable.

But there is a fondness in these pieces that’s endearing. It is easy to hear that Stock wrote each concerto for a musician he knew well and that he injected the music with elements of their biographies. In the last movement of Concierto cubano (2000), Cuban-born violinist Andrés Cárdenes darts about with a lithe, energetic sound while the string section plucks out pizzicato clave rhythms. It’s playful and upbeat; just don’t think to deeply about the politics of cultural appropriation. Oborama is a concerto for oboe(s) from 2010, in which an agile Alex Klein switches between five different members of the oboe family. The music for each is fairly typecast: the cor anglais opens with a plaintive melody over moody strings; a musettte follows with little morse-code-like bleeps against dry percussion, the bass oboe adds a lush, lyrical tune and so on until a bouncy closing movement for standard oboe. The Percussion Concerto of 2007 (no clever title this time) contains the most straight-up saccharine writing of the three works on the disc. Soloist Lisa Pegher plays soft-edged sounds with great care and suppleness while the Boston Modern Orchestra Project add gushing strings and affirming trumpet fanfares. Gil Rose conducts with big gestures and bright energy.