Henri Herz was a phenomenon in 1830s Paris and 1940s America, but today his music is mostly forgotten. He wrote eight piano concertos, one of which was lost. Concertos 1, 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 appear across two previous volumes of the Romantic Piano Concertos series. Here, Howard Shelley and the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra put on their finest dancing shoes to complete the cycle with Piano Concerto No.2 (the one with which Herz conquered America in 1846) and three extended fantasies.

A real rarity from Hyperion's Anglo-Australian artistic collaboration: music by an Australian composer who was once at the heart of the English establishment. Malcolm Williamson was one of many Australian creative artists who relocated to Britain in the mid-twentieth century. This double-album set of the complete Piano Concertos is therefore an important document as well as a compendium of deeply appealing music. Williamson wrote with a generosity of emotion and melodic flair rare in the mid-twentieth century, in a forward-looking idiom. Piers Lane, the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Howard Shelley are the ideal performers of these unjustly neglected works.