Charles Tomlinson Griffes's life was cut brutally short in 1920 at the age of only 35. As a kind of American impressionist, he was one of the more advanced composers of his generation, moving further on in his last years. He orchestrated the first and last movements of his picturesque piano suite Roman Sketches but never got around to doing the two middle pieces. What's unique about this recording is that Craig Leon has now done it for him and at the same time cleared up some of the confusions between the piano and orchestral versions Griffes did make.

This is well worth doing. Griffes's own scoring is subtle, with delicate use of harps and celesta, and he amplifies his piano score in ways Leon seems to avoid. For example, Leon makes insufficient allowance for the fact that a piano piece uses pedal and therefore more notes should be sustained in an orchestral transcription. So the new scorings are literal and dry, lacking the lusciousness of Griffes's own orchestration.

Whereas Griffes was a hypersensitive romantic, Eric Korngold was brazen - and he's now made great headway on CD. His substantial Symphonic Serenade for strings dates from 1947, well after he'd left his native Vienna to become a successful Hollywood composer and was trying to get back into the mainstream of concert music. Mahler encouraged Korngold when he was brought to him as a remarkable child prodigy and there's still a lot of Mahler in the Symphonic Serenade, with all the fluency that made Korngold a masterly film-music composer. The LSO strings come over well in a decent recording.