Daniel Hope is one of those musicians who can convince in just about any repertoire; he’s recorded unusual concertos like the Berg and Britten, and performed Max Richter’s reimagining of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Here, he turns to that unfairly maligned genre, film music. Hope was inspired by the way that many of the early twentieth-century European composers persecuted by the Nazis escaped to America, and arrived in Hollywood. As a result, the ‘Hollywood sound’ of early films (think of the dramatic, sweeping scores of the silent film era) can be traced directly back to the late Romantics – the style of Rózsa or Korngold is not so different from that of Strauss, or Schoenberg’s early works.

There’s quite a cross-section of composers here. In crafting the program, Hope’s starting point was Korngold’s Violin Concerto, though there are tracks from later film composers like Williams and Morricone included as well. The Korngold concerto is given a stirring performance, but it is, disappointingly, the only solid chunk of music on the CD. The other tracks are fairly short, and so I’m not sure that it’d be comfortable to listen to the entire CD in one sitting – the tracks have a tendency...