Music When did you last hear their father?

William Lloyd Webber Purcell Room, London

When I was a student, one of my exams required me to play a piece by William Lloyd Webber called Colours of the Organ - the cover was smeared with them in a sort of moir pattern, though the music itself was dark brown and thickly contrapuntal. The composer taught at the Royal College in London and looked a bit like Leonid Brezhnev, or an enormous beetle. When his son Andrew hit the jackpot with Jesus Christ Superstar, it took me a long time to swallow the family connection.

Now Andrew's younger brother - the cellist Julian - is rehabilitating his father's music and played some in a lunchtime recital at the Purcell Room on Thursday, with the pianists John Lill (an old family friend) and Andrew West, the viola-player Jane Atkins and the tenor John Graham Hall. The large audience included lots of musicians, some of them famous, and people in or around the business.

We live in times when the future - and even the present - seems to shrink, while the past grows ever larger. In some ways, it's no bad thing to keep an eye on the byways of music. But let's not pretend that William Lloyd Webber's music is anything more than derivative and modest, if none the less enjoyable.

John Lill played, very nicely and from memory, six piano pieces which, though written in the 1940s, evoked the time of the First World War or even earlier. The first was a pretty feeble Rachmaninov pastiche, and I liked best a very short, fleet scherzo and an arabesque, the two most linear and least flashy pieces of the set.

Julian Lloyd Webber then joined Lill in two warm, rather salonish pieces recalling, perhaps, early Frank Bridge, though the first, In the Half Light, was written the year Julian was born. A sonatina for viola and piano had a vigorous finale, preceded by a slow introduction and a short, lyrical first movement with a pastoral, elegiac flavour. Jane Atkins looked very musical, but her under-nourished tone disappeared rather often behind Andrew West's keyboard contribution, considerate though he was.

To end the concert, the tenor John Graham Hall struggled bravely to get his voice round six songs, with West giving much-needed support. Hall really wasn't up to them - they needed a singer like Anthony Rolfe Johnson, sweetly lyrical and yet strong. Despite which, there was no denying Lloyd Webber's expertise in a sentimental, sometimes humorous genre. I couldn't remember any of them after one hearing, but at the time their melodies seemed to flow easily and naturally enough.

Adrian Jack