This companion record to Michael Tippett’s piano works on Hyperion by Osborne and the BBC SSO (with Martyn Brabbins) collects all three of Britten’s concerted works for piano and orchestra: Piano Concerto, Young Apollo for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, and Diversions, written for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, brother of the famous philosopher, who also commissioned works for left-hand only and orchestra from Richard Strauss, Ravel and Franz Schmidt. Wittgenstein wasn’t impressed and returned the score to the young composer, thanking him but confessing: “I do not understand a note of it and will not play it.” Listening to Britten’s Op 21 — a theme, 10 variations and finale — today, this seems a baffling judgment, for even for 1940 this is hardly avant-garde music. Osborne exults in Britten’s dazzlingly pianistic writing, and we get to hear the original 1938 version of the concerto’s third movement, a raptly beautiful Recitative and Aria (Britten replaced it with an Impromptu at a faster tempo in 1945): a moment of repose in this exhilarating music. Young Apollo, which Britten later suppressed, came a year between the Concerto and Diversions, and it well describes the 26-year-old composer inebriated with the exuberance of his own virtuosity. A thrilling disc.

Hyperion CDA67625

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