Fifty-five years separate Elliott Carter’s Piano Sonata (1945-46) from the brief Retrouvailles, written in 2000 for Boulez’s 75th birthday. Soon after completing the sonata, Carter began to develop those more radical elements of style and aesthetic attitude which he still employs today, although it would be more than 30 years before this ultra-expressionistic tone was heard in a solo piano work – Night Fantasies (1980).

It is in the tough, turbulent world of Night Fantasies that Winston Choi comes into his own. A pupil of Ursula Oppens, one of the work’s co-commissioners, he has the needle-sharp articulation and instinctive grasp of process without which Night Fantasies’s 20 minutes can turn into something of a nightmare. The same effortless digital facility, and the same mercurial intensity, are not quite so satisfying in the very different world of the sonata; sheer velocity can come across as hard-driven and lacking in delicacy in music whose balances between lyricism and dramatic propulsion are vital, but very hard to get right. Am I right in thinking that Choi was less engaged by this neo-classical epic than he was by the later modernist works? For whatever reason, he tends to scale up the sonata’s dynamics in the interests of immediate effect, and the beautifully restrained coda to the final movement is oddly neutral in spirit.

Such factors suggest that it’s still too early to discard Charles Rosen’s 1982 recording of the sonata, available with Night Fantasies and 90+, even though Choi’s collection is more complete, with well-characterised accounts of the Two Diversions (1999). The recording of the instrument – a Yamaha CF 111S – is fine, but the disc allows insufficient space between certain tracks: for example, a mere two seconds, at most, between Night Fantasies and Retrouvailles.