CD: Tcherepnin Piano Concertos, Ogawa/Singapore Symphony/Shui

A whole family of Tcherepnins populates Russian music. This one, excellently served by the Singapore Symphony, is Alexander, born in 1899, whose family left St Petersburg for Paris after the revolution. After 1945 Tcherepnin moved to Chicago and spent the rest of his life in the US, teaching, composing and theorising; he died in 1977.

His music seems equally rootless: there's a kind of all-purpose neoclassicism, with shades of Prokofiev and Martinu, in the one-movement Piano Concerto No 2 from 1923, and a slightly apologetic orientalism (Tcherepnin's wife was a Chinese-born pianist) in No 4 from 1947. The Symphonic Prayer composed in 1959 seems the strongest piece here, far more idiomatically assured as if finally, in the stylistic melting pot of the US, he felt at home.