Apart from Debussy and Ravel, 20th-century French piano repertoire is not very familiar to most of us. Yet Dukas’s Piano Sonata, first heard in 1901, is both ambitious in scale and considered a major contribution to French keyboard music. Dukas settles for a four-movement structure with an extended, meditative slow movement. The brilliant, toccata-like Scherzo has a three-part contemplative fugato for the Trio but it is the finale that sets the seal on the work’s scope, the longest movement of the four.

It is not considered a cyclic work nor Lisztian, yet in many ways it is both. The themes are not immediately identifiable, for the piano-writing is prolix, yet the first movement is dominated by its principal motifs (especially the first) which achieve many transformations, while the slow movement seems to grow out of the closing bars of the first movement. Certainly the finale is an extended summing-up, opening with a long Très lent but later exuberant with its material and again dense in texture. Overall it is an uneven work: some fine pages and others less memorable.

Olivier Chauzu plays it commandingly, and he is delectably enticing in the engaging Minuet on which the Rameau Variations are based. They are far easier to follow, clearly patterned on Brahms’s Haydn Variations, and they are just as inventive. Chauzu characterises them most felicitously, but he is at his most sensitive in La plainte, which moves into a Debussian impressionistic world and even quotes from the composer. The recording is full-bodied and real throughout, but does not disguise the considerable complexity of the Sonata’s textures.