‘The American Project’ is a grand title for a recording of a forgettable new piano concerto by an American conductor-composer, prefaced by an unrelated five-minute ditty by another American conductor-composer that would have worked far better appended to the other end.

Yuja Wang and Teddy Abrams studied together at the Curtis Institute, the latter standing in for entire orchestras at one piano while the former practised solo concerto parts on another. She became a superstar pianist, he a versatile musician among whose many hats is, since 2014, that of music director of the Louisville Orchestra – one of the most distinguished institutions in America when it comes to the dissemination of contemporary music.

Heard against the best works commissioned and recorded in Louisville, Abrams’s Piano Concerto is all gong and no dinner: an over-excitable 40-minute romp through mid-20th-century popular styles rooted in big-band music but robbed of any swing by a developmentally stifled, dad-dancing symphony orchestra. Doubly unfortunate is that it finally reveals one facet of pianism in which Wang doesn’t astonish – stride piano – and proves persistently keen on proving the point.

The theme introduced in ‘Exposition’ bears some resemblance to the main title from The Blues Brothers but is not taken anywhere. There is little that strays beyond a basic vertical combination of ‘idea’ and ‘accompaniment’. Some interesting textures prick the ear at the beginning of the seventh movement, ‘Relaxed’, but the actual musical fruit proves as low-hanging as that title. Set stylistic chassis are presented without sufficiently fertile material or structural interest to develop, disrupt or surprise. Purcell could have done more with the looping bass line of the eighth movement, ‘Solos’, with just a keyboard at his disposal. Processes of mustering and building often lead to little more than a held breath that gives way to another cadenza (four in total) – either sub-Rachmaninov rhapsody with insufficient thematic support or rhythmically basic rants that tap Wang’s arm power but little else in her formidable toolkit.

I hope others derive more pleasure from the concerto than I do. Perhaps I should see it played live, in which context it’s probably good fun even with a pianist of lesser calibre than Wang. Michael Tilson Thomas’s whimsical, very encore-like You Come Here Often? is a loungey, Californian-accented encore with the odd smile-inducing trick (whistling included). Enough to make an album – sorry, ‘project’ – worthy of the DG badge or, indeed, your money? I fear not.