CCMusic.com

The only collected survey of George Benjamin's piano music on record, from a Dutch pianist who specialises in new music and has worked closely with the composer. Benjamin was an accomplished pianist as well as composer from his early years, and it seems natural in retrospect that his first published work should be the Piano Sonata he composed in 1977-8, as a prodigious student of Olivier Messiaen and Yvonne Loriod. Certain harmonic touches may mark the sonata out as the work of 'a Messiaen pupil' but the unsettled, leaping gestural sense of the piece is particular to Benjamin. Dedicated to Loriod, Sortilèges (1981) makes clear it's French heritage in the notes as well as the title, while the three subsequent Studies for piano, composed over the next four years, find Benjamin working out intricate rhythmic problems and their solutions. Benjamin wrote wrote Shadowlines for PierreLaurent Aimard in 2001. This set of six canonic preludes takes Benjamin's inclination to distill and pare back to a new level, while the piano writing itself is richer and more unselfconsciously informed by the heritage of piano literature. Finally, there are the Piano Figures of 2004, written for students of the piano and accordingly pitched at a technically lower level than the other pieces, but no less preoccupied with the rhythmic games and sudden swerves of thought that are hallmarks of his most complex music.