Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue provide jauntily jazzy bookends to a new piece in this French-US collection. Philip Lasser’s The Circle and the Child, a concerto written for the American pianist Simone Dinnerstein, reworks material from a Bach chorale into three rambling movements of pleasant but unmemorable music. It suffers in comparison to its companions, even though both interpretations are rather too well-behaved and the recording quality curiously flat and lifeless. Dinnerstein’s Ravel is technically assured but emotionally restrained, and Kristjan Järvi and the daintily tasteful MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony players make the Gershwin more Broadstairs than Broadway.
