STEPHEN Walsh's assessment epitomizes the generally received view of Constant Lambert (1905–51). The book he was reviewing when he made this remark, Stephen Lloyd's Constant Lambert: Beyond the Rio Grande (2014), sets out in great detail Lambert's key musical activities as composer, conductor and writer (at times, as Walsh points out, risking overload) in an attempt to encourage interest beyond the work in the title. But it seems likely that, without a parallel champion in the realm of performance, Rio Grande (1927) will indeed continue to be the work for which Lambert is best known, even though its brand of jazz-tinted exoticism can have little of its original effect on today's audiences, who are much more familiar with the idiom. Walsh asserts the case for ‘a handful of works belong[ing] in the repertoire’, including Eight Poems of Li-Po (1926–9) in the ensemble version, Music for Orchestra (1927), and the Concerto for Piano and Nine Players (1930–1). To this might be added Lambert's setting of words from Thomas Nashe's Pleasant Comedy in Summer's Last Will and Testament (1932–5), despite its failing to transcend the sum of its most striking moments: the latter stages of the purely orchestral sixth movement, Rondo burlesca (King Pest), and the climax and aftermath of the final Saraband. But for all his technical skill and inventiveness, Lambert's compositional voice lacks sufficient distinctiveness of personality to secure more than an occasional airing. His two other principal activities, conducting and journalism, are ephemeral in the literal sense, though some of the performances he recorded – catalogued by Lloyd over eighteen pages of appendix – are still commercially available and of historical interest. They include the first recording (1929) of Walton's Facade (1922–9, rev. 1942, 1951, 1977), with Edith Sitwell reciting (the Waltons and the Sitwells were his neighbours in Chelsea); the first recording of Warlock's The Curlew (1920–2) in 1931, a performance that is rather unsteady in rhythm and intonation at times, and marred by traffic noises during the opening bars; a 1946 recording of Delius's Piano Concerto (in the original 1897 version) with Benno Moiseiwitsch; and selections of ballet music with the Sadler's Wells and Philharmonia orchestras.