Classical review: Britten, Piano Concerto; Young Apollo; Diversions, Osborne/BBCSSO/Volkov

For a composer who was such a wonderfully gifted player and whose song accompaniments are so hauntingly memorable, Benjamin Britten's almost total avoidance of the piano as a solo instrument for most of his composing career is hard to credit. All that he composed for his own instrument in the last 35 years of his life was a test piece for the inaugural Leeds piano competition in 1963. So the three concertante works that Steven Osborne plays with such brilliance date from the late 1930s and early 40s. The Piano Concerto and the Diversions for piano left hand and orchestra were always part of the official work list, but Young Apollo - for piano, string quartet and string orchestra, and inspired by Keats's unfinished poem Hesperion - was premiered by Britten in Toronto in 1939, and withdrawn soon afterwards, only being published after his death.

It's the concerto, though, that is the real draw here, for Osborne's account has such deftness and wit that its only possible rival on disc is the performance by Sviatoslav Richter with Britten conducting, which Decca recorded at Snape Maltings in 1970. Like Richter, Osborne carefully balances the Lisztian bravura of some of the piano writing to the moments of deeper reflection, while never disguising the work's debt to Prokofiev's concertos. Ilan Volkov keeps the orchestral accompaniment on a typically tight rein. Osborne is equally impressive in the rarely heard Diversions and in Young Apollo, too, without ever really making a convincing case for that piece as top-drawer Britten.