Michael Tilson Thomas has always been a committed advocate of the American radicals of the first half of the 20th century. Here, he conducts works by Henry Cowell and his pupil Lou Harrison alongside a brilliantly virtuosic and detailed account (in its 1927 revision) of Amériques, the first work Edgard Varèse completed after he settled in the US in 1915. While Harrison's 1970 Concerto for organ with percussion orchestra sounds rather contrived, like a Messiaen organ piece accompanied by a gamelan, Cowell's two pieces are the real discovery, especially the rather austere and monumental Synchrony, from 1930, with its lonely trumpet solos and streams of tightly packed tone clusters. The Piano Concerto was composed at the same time, and grafts the same cluster-based style on to the traditional three-movement concerto skeleton. Its solo part is dashingly well played by Jeremy Denk.

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