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.

Maria Grenfell’s music has been described as ‘expansive, effusive and energetic’, ‘magic’, and ‘refreshingly groovy’. Her chamber music is played around the world. Her orchestral music has been commissioned and performed by all the major symphony orchestras in Australia and New Zealand; this album presents world premiere recordings of six of Grenfell’s best-loved orchestral works, exploring subjects as diverse as Maori legend, Tasmania’s natural beauty, the struggles of immigrant workers, and 18th-century explorer Matthew Flinders’ extraordinary cat Trim!

This marks the first album ever recorded of Australian guitar concertos, starring internationally acclaimed classical guitarist Karin Schaupp with two different orchestras. Schaupp turns her attention to these modern pieces, all composed between 1989 and 1995, by Ross Edwards, Philip Bračanin and Peter Sculthorpe, representing their major works for the instrument. A fourth piece, the inspiration for the album title, is Mosaic for Adrian Walter by Richard Charlton, himself a guitarist.

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.