There's the distant sound of the bottoms of barrels being scraped in this latest addition to Hyperion's romantic piano concerto series. The pedal piano was briefly fashionable in the middle decades of the 19th century. Originally designed so that organists could practise at home, it attracted the attention of a number of composers who were tempted to write pieces specifically for it. Alkan and Schumann are the best known of them now, but Saint-Saëns also wrote a pedal piano piece, and Gounod was inspired in the 1880s to write a whole group of concertante pieces for a young French pedal piano virtuoso, who was in fact Alkan's son. Even though they are very well played here by Roberto Prosseda, none of the pieces, frankly, is up to much. There's a Roumanian Dance and a Fantasy on the Russian National Anthem, and both just go through the motions. A flabby four-movement Concerto in E flat has more than a touch of Beethoven about the orchestral writing, and a Suite Concertante, whose central movements at least show the personal touch that's lacking elsewhere, is more engaging.