Revered as one of Hollywood’s leading film composers, Franz Waxman was also a conductor and impresario. He founded the Los Angeles Festival Orchestra, and he gave many première performances on the West Coast. His own Sinfonietta for String Orchestra and Timpani was written on board a ship whilst en route from New York to Europe in 1955. Full of exciting contrast, it has recently been revived as a ballet score. Waxman premièred the revised version of Lukas Foss’s Piano Concerto No 2 in 1953. The multi-talented Foss, who plays the piano part, crafted a work accommodating the past and the present. Arthur Rubinstein championed it, calling it ‘one of the finest pieces written in our time’.