Both Alfredo Casella and Giorgio Federico Ghedini are featured in ongoing Naxos series of orchestral works, but this is the first release to couple the two of them. The pieces have much in common – not least, both are concertos using the rare combination of piano trio and orchestra, pioneered by Beethoven – but they are also beautifully contrasted.

Casella wrote his Triple Concerto for his own Trio Italiano, who performed it five hundred times on three continents in less than a decade. Ghedini’s Concerto dell’albatro adds the voice of a narrator to the piano trio and orchestra, evoking, in words from Herman Melville’s sea story Moby-Dick, a remarkable encounter with an Antarctic albatross.