Hyperion continue their exploration of the Romantic piano concerto with an intriguing disc of Australian examples, Piers Lane making a convincing case for his countrymen’s music. Alfred Hill’s 1941 concerto has a breezy, sunny disposition, with hardly a dark cloud in the sky, even in its bold, expansive last movement. Hill had a vast output of orchestral and chamber works and rarely wasted an idea: the four-movement concerto is a reworking of an earlier piano sonata, also heard here. He conducted the first Australian performance of George Frederick Boyle’s 1911 piano concerto, thought to be the first substantial piece in this form in the Antipodes. Altogether graver than Hill’s, it has a final movement to rival anything coming out of Europe at the time.
