An obvious coupling (all Rawsthorne's keyboard concertos on a single CD) but an absorbing one, which might prompt a positive revaluation of all three works. The seldom-heard First Concerto would be likelier, you might think, to demand our indulgence than the once popular Second: an earlyish piece, in some ways a sketch for its successor, its influences (Prokofiev and Walton, mainly) not yet quite digested. In fact it's such a cleverly made piece, at the same time so attractively enigmatic, that you may be even more irritated by its current relative neglect than by that of the Second Concerto. The first movement's rhythmic flexibility and its inventive thematic transformation enable it to withstand comparisons with Prokofiev and Walton quite easily, and although the central chaconne's alternation of elegant melody with crisply pianistic incisiveness again recalls Prokofiev, it is its personal, elusively elegiac tone that lingers in the memory. And why does an Italian partisan tune provoke in the finale first a raucous tutti, then a quiet, oddly fragmented conclusion?
The Second Concerto is in a way more straightforward: its grateful, at times showy, keyboard writing, the bravura and unshadowed exuberance of its finale (springing from an irresistible tune, an anglicized rumba) have obvious popular appeal. But again it's the compositional craft and the likeable personal voice that draw you back for further hearings: the cunning integration of the first movement's seeming disparity (in fact it's effectively monothematic); the contrasts in the Adagio (audibly descended from those in the First Concerto's chaconne) of unquiet darkness and vividly flashing brilliance now Rawsthorne's own indebted to Prokofiev but repaying that debt with interest. It is fine, striking and strange music, but a more worrying strangeness continually disturbs the late Double Concerto. This is a work of sudden outbursts, discontinuities and contradictions, tense and often stormy, lyricism being more likely to provoke than to soothe it I am at the moment in short, more interested than convinced by it, but the piece is so well performed that I shall persevere.
The two solo concertos can be unreservedly recommended. I don't suppose Tozer or Bamert had either work in their repertory when this recording was planned, but their respect for the music (and in Tozer's case an enjoyment of Rawsthorne's brilliantly idiomatic keyboard writing) is audible in the great care they take over it. An excellent recording, too, which makes no apologies for Rawsthorne's occasional patches of exuberant (in the case of the Double Concerto choleric) noisiness.'