A diverse grouping of first sonatas by American composers encompassed Cecile Licad’s Anthology of American Piano Music, Vol 1 (A/16); Vol 2 is given over to American nocturnes, or nocturne-like works. A brush of the strings opens the first of two discs with the opening theme of George Crumb’s Eine kleine Mitternachtmusik, a set of variations based upon Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight’. Rather than play the Crumb work all together, Licad intersperses the variations between other pieces, linking, for example, Amy Beach’s A Hermit Thrush at Eve and Griffes’s Notturno. Licad’s canny programme-building yields other intriguing juxtapositions, such as Barber’s classically tinged Nocturne, Copland’s craggy though tender Night Thoughts and the imposing pillars demarcating Leo Ornstein’s 13-minute Nocturne No 2.

The Chadwick, Farwell, Foote and Schelling nocturnes are basically charming European knock-offs, but Mason’s Night Wind, Bloch’s In the Night and the Beach works abound with personality and strong ideas. Grofé’s Deep Nocturne may not be truly deep but it’s unpretentiously tuneful, while Joseph Lamb’s Ragtime Nightingale remains one of the idiom’s classics, and Marc-André Hamelin’s Little Nocturne is a minor masterpiece of sly humour.

With all of my concentration on the music, I realise that I haven’t mentioned Licad’s performances. That’s probably because her authoritative yet flexible pianism adapts to the various styles with idiomatic ease. She understands Crumb’s textural fragility, she confidently sails through Mason’s glittering runs, she parses Beach’s stunning modulations with perfect timing, she minimises Ornstein’s tendency to ramble and she brings just the right lift to Lamb’s gentle syncopations. In other words, you hear the music first, the pianism second, and that’s a good sign, not to mention the excellent engineering and annotations. I look forward to this series’ further instalments.