Lord Berners’s early music was avant-garde in style earning the admiration of Stravinsky, and while it was soon to become more accessible, it never lost its distinctive style and flavour. The Triumph of Neptune is one of his major works and his most ambitious ballet score, commissioned by Diaghilev with choreography by Balanchine. A ballet-pantomime-harlequinade, its inconsequential plot features music as diverse as it is brilliantly inventive. L’uomo dai baffi is a delicious ballet for puppets with stripped-back instrumentation, and Philip Lane’s deft orchestrations of Valses bourgeoises and Polka offer ripe wit.

The Triumph of Neptune is Berners’s best-known score, probably because the suite was twice recorded by Sir Thomas Beecham (his second, Philadelphia 1952 recording can be found on 980798) and, much more recently in the 1980s, by Barry Wordsworth and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.