Roots is the debut solo disc from the young American violinist Randall Goosby. It takes a brief but affirmative glance at black US classical music, turning up a few slender but worthwhile gems.

What it’s not is a programme dedicated to composers of colour. Instead, it’s partly a celebration of the fact that when there began to be an American sound in classical music, that sound came from black music. Four numbers from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, in Heifetz’s showy yet lyrical arrangements, are an obvious but apt inclusion. Dvořák’s Sonatina in G, written during the Czech composer’s time in New York, has spiritual and Native American music running through it.

But Goosby otherwise spotlights music by black composers, starting with Shelter Island, a piquant and bluesy duet for violin and double bass by Xavier Dubois Foley, who gives an arrestingly virtuosic performance on bass. Blue/s Forms, three short, sinuous solos by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson written in 1979, are dispatched by Goosby with no fuss but plenty of style. Florence Price, whose music finally seems to be emerging from its neglect, gets another boost with Goosby and Zhu Wang’s tender performance of her Adoration and lively, expansive ones of her Fantasies Nos 1 and 2, claimed as premiere recordings. Wang is slightly backgrounded by the sound balance, but his understated expressiveness and Goosby’s firm sound give these pieces their due weight.

Goosby’s mentors include Sanford Allen, the dedicatee of Perkinson’s pieces and the first black violinist in the New York Philharmonic, and Itzhak Perlman. You can hear the influence of the latter in the suavity and lushness of his playing, never more so than in the slow middle movement of William Grant Still’s 1943 Suite: Goosby finds a special tone here, soft but vibrant, and the melody soars.

This week’s other pick

Aus Wien, a piano recital from Alasdair Beatson rooted in Vienna, or at least the idea of it. The carnival snapshots of Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien are followed by Schoenberg’s laser-focused Six Little Piano Pieces – which rub up against the slightly self-important ballroom glitter of Ravel’s Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, giving way to the exuberance of Korngold’s Piano Sonata No 3. Schubert’s little Kupelwieser Waltz is a gorgeous sign off, sounding as if we’re overhearing it through an open window in the twilight. Beatson pinpoints each style while making the whole thing hang together beautifully.