KEY POINTS:
In his mid-80s, American composer Ned Rorem is finally getting the attention he deserves. For many years, thanks to his waspish wit and well-woven words on the world around him, Rorem was best known for his often outrageous diaries. In 1957, he sniffed at Liberace "playing all the right notes wrong" and contemplated how "sleep was a noisy ocean that one hopes to cross from night to morning and arrive cured".
Forty years later, coping with depression and a dying partner, he is still ruminating on life and art, ripping into Frank McCourt and Carly Simon while contemplating an Aids opera inspired by Edgar Allan Poe.
As a composer, Rorem is thriving. Last year saw an opera based on Thornton Wilder's Our Town. A new one based on the Little Nemo cartoons is in the pipeline and Naxos continues to release major instrumental works in its American Classics series.
During the past year, we have seen the pairing of the Flute and Violin Concertos on Naxos 559278, as well as the fine 1998 Double Concerto on 559316.
This is a lean, emotionally incisive work, turning its back on the percussion instruments which Rorem claims are "at best decoration and at worst immoral, like too many earrings or exclamation points".
There's no such attitude in the latest Naxos coupling, Rorem's 1971 Second Piano Concerto and the 2002 Cello Concerto, both receiving premiere recordings.
The Piano Concerto, written for Julius Katchen, is in the grand tradition, unabashedly tonal with climaxes that rush to the head.
The slow movement is a pastoral idyll while the Finale, bearing the instructions "Real fast!" is a rip-roaring tribute to Poulenc, with thundering timpani and quickfire jazz rhythms.
British pianist Simon Mulligan, who pursues a jazz career on the side, is a stunning soloist and Jose Serbrier wraps the Royal Scottish National Orchestra around him like a glove.
The Cello Concerto is in eight movements, mostly short. The titles run from Curtain Raise to Adrift but my favourite is A Single Tone, A Dozen Implications in which the orchestra shifts and stalks around one note played with hypnotic authority by the superb Wen-Sinn Yang.
* Ned Rorem, Concertos (Naxos 8.559315)
