Born in Beirut and based in Paris for more than four decades, Bechara El Khoury is in his early sixties with a catalogue of over 100 works to his credit. Having recorded several discs of his orchestral output, Naxos now turns to that for piano as dominated by his four sonatas.

Encompassing the greater part of his creativity, the piano sonatas provide a viable overview of their composer’s evolution. The First Sonata (1984) is audibly indebted to the music of Scriabin and Messiaen, its (over?) elaborate textures balanced by a formal scheme whose concise opening movement takes in exposition and development, with the even shorter pair that follows acting as reprise and coda. The remaining three sonatas (1998, 2003 and 2012) are each cast in two movements that are respectively slow then fast, though such consistency should not detract from the way their relative extremes of motion are gradually made more equivocal before reaching a culmination in the Fourth Sonata, its constant yet always subtle interplay of anticipations and echoes being played out in music of intriguing ambiguity.

Giacomo Scinardo (to whom the Fourth Sonata is dedicated) proves a committed advocate in music where a keen virtuosity underlies even the more introspective passages. Also included here are three items conceived as test-pieces to competitions – the binary expressive contrasts of Rivers (2012) complemented by the onrush of Étude (1992) then the aphoristic utterances of Thème et variations (1987). Those who have previously encountered El Khoury through his powerful symphony The Ruins of Beirut (2/03) should investigate this release.