SOMM Recordings announces the perfect escape from Lockdown Blues with a collection of appealing piano miniatures compiled and performed by Peter Dickinson to chase all your cares away.

Lockdown Blues includes soothing masterpieces by Erik Satie (Trois Gnossiennes, Trois Gymnopédies), Francis Poulenc (Bal fantôme, Pastourelle) and Edward MacDowell (To a Wild Rose), alongside Eugene Goossens’s melancholic Lament for a Departed Doll and Samuel Barber’s valedictory Canzonetta. There is whimsy in George Gershwin’s Three-Quarter Blues (familiar to British audiences as the theme to radio and television’s After Henry) and Who Cares? from the musical Of Thee I Sing.

Of interest are 12 iconic jazz tunes by Duke Ellington. Heard here in their original sheet-music versions, they are pure Ellington, the product of a sophisticated composer. Among featured classic songs are Solitude, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, Mood Indigo and It Don’t Mean a Thing (If it Ain’t Got That Swing).

In his introduction, renowned broadcaster and writer Humphrey Burton describes Lockdown Blues as ‘a delightful hour of discovery’, hailing the Ellington selections as ‘a real find that will surely be much anthologised long after Lockdown has been forgotten’.

The disc is completed by three pieces by Dickinson – the titular Lockdown Blues, Freda’s Blues and Blue Rose, a take on MacDowell’s To a Wild Rose – together with Constant Lambert’s Elegiac Blues, Lennox Berkeley’s Prelude VI and John Cage’s Satie-influenced In a Landscape.

Peter Dickinson’s career as a pianist has largely been in recitals, broadcasts and recordings with his sister, mezzo Meriel Dickinson, and he has worked with many other performers.

Dickinson’s Paraphrase II is included on Nathan Williamson’s 20th-century British piano music collection, Colour and Light (SOMMCD0196) and was praised by the British Music Society as ‘a Theme with six hugely contrasting variations exploring the outer edges of tonality in a brilliant, structurally refined way’.