The greater recorded availability of Irish new music over these past two decades has enabled composers such as Raymond Deane (60 last year) to gain a much-needed hearing. Certainly his unequivocal stance is impressively manifest in Noctuary (2011) – 12 ‘night pieces’ are divided into two books that imaginatively traverse the spectrum of post-war piano-writing.

Over its course, salient aspects unify what might otherwise have been a disparate sequence. Hence the C sharp minor tonality informing the ruminative opening ‘Minerva’s Owl…’, that returns (albeit from a D flat vantage) in the speculative close of the final ‘Couchant’; or the interplay of thirds in the atmospheric ‘Duskiss’ which contracts into a haunting dyad motif that ruffles the ethereal unfolding of ‘Cereus’. Other pieces here have a distinctive character redolent of (if not beholden to) earlier models – notably the Carter-like contrasts in texture and register in ‘Mezzotint’ or Ligetian play with asynchronous phrases in ‘Night Watches’. Starkly contrasted with each other, the various motivic inter-connections across and between pieces ensure that the cycle as a whole feels much more than the sum of its individual parts.

That it is the case is due in no small part to the artistry of Hugh Tinney, whose sheer breadth of repertoire has made possible a range of major retrospectives as well as expanding present-day pianism, and who has been recorded in an immediate yet not too confined acoustic. Pithy notes on each piece by the composer further enhance another notable release from Resonus.