Few of us, I suspect, will have encountered either of these Australian composers, so a brief introduction is in order. The long-lived Alfred Hall (1869-1960) hailed from Melbourne, was trained in Leipzig (a fact that will not surprise anyone after hearing the two works here) and, returning to the Antipodes, eventually settled in Sydney to become, in Neville Cardus’s description, ‘the grand old man of Australian music’ (he amassed over 200 works in every genre). George Boyle (1886-1948) was born in Sydney, never to return after leaving in 1905 to study for five years with Busoni in Berlin. He made his career in America, teaching at the Peabody, Curtis and Juilliard schools. Among his students were Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber.

As to their music, I cannot say I was bowled over with an urgent desire to investigate the rest of their output. Hill’s Concerto in A major from 1941, in effect a piano-and-orchestra version of his Piano Sonata in A major from 1920, which is imaginatively included here, is in four movements with the kind of now-dated subtitles one often encounters in music of the earlier decade: ‘The Question’, ‘Fancies’, ‘Homage to Chopin’ and ‘Contrasts’. It lasts 26 minutes and includes every cliché of the Romantic piano concerto of the 1860s and ’70s without adding anything new or individual, though the Chopin movement is very pretty and the finale has an attractively jaunty, open air Percy Grainger feel to it.

The Boyle Concerto, too, is a throwback to the second half of the 19th century, though written in 1911. Glimpses of Tchaikovsky at his most ebullient, second-hand phrases of Rachmaninov and prescient pastiches from the classical film ‘concertos’ of the 1940s (Cornish Rhapsody, Warsaw Concerto, etc) seem to provide most of the character and material. One cannot imagine a more persuasive, artful advocate of the music of his two compatriots than Piers Lane who, frankly, is worth hearing in whatever he plays. However, I think this 69th volume of Hyperion’s series is one to hear once or twice before saying a polite ‘thank you’ and moving on.