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. So much of Benjamin’s later music is fascinatingly prefigured here, including a sense of timing for a gradual accumulation of tension (‘stormy eruptions’ and ‘savage violence’ in the composer’s words) that marks out his first major orchestral score, Ringed by the Flat Horizon. Underlying that sense of timing is a feeling for dramatic gesture which has found its natural expression in a series of operas written during the last 20 years.

Dedicated to Loriod, Sortilèges (1981) makes clear its 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. Even the Relativity Rag takes a quirky, sideways look at its superficially familiar material. The next piano pieces had to wait until 2001, and the Shadowlines which Benjamin wrote for Pierre-Laurent Aimard. 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. All these pieces have been recorded, but never by the same pianist, making Erik Bertsch’s new collection unique, and indispensable for any collector of new music.