This disc is an unofficial sequel to British pianist John Tilbury’s album ‘For Tomasz Sikorski’, which I reviewed in Gramophone’s August 2013 issue. When Tilbury went to Warsaw in 1961 to study with the Polish pianist Zbigniew Drzewiecki, inside his suitcase he had packed scores by the likes of Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, La Monte Young and Morton Feldman, new music that was considered verboten in Eastern Europe and access to which gave the Polish modern composition scene a much-needed shot in the arm. ‘Grand Tour’ was recorded in 2015 when Tilbury returned to Poland to celebrate the legacy of a network of associations that grew up around The Musical Workshop – the new music ensemble Tilbury formed with his Polish colleagues to perform his booty of scores alongside newer, tailor-made compositions.

Cardew’s classic Solo with Accompaniment and Sikorski’s Echoes II both put a conscious frame around combinations of sounds that would otherwise merely flirt with the moment. Tilbury has recorded Cardew’s 1964 piece before – with the ensemble Apartment House on Matchless Recordings and with harpist Rhodri Davies and double bassist Michael Duch on the Norwegian +3DB label – and this new version, complementary rather than competing, is exceptionally sensitively heard. The ‘solo’ piano part, fully notated, provides a skeleton of stabbed notes and bold cadences that the semi-improvised, graphically notated accompaniment fleshes out with largely sustained arcs of sound. Sikorski’s piece, written during the same era, has live sounds ricocheting against recorded blasts of piano and percussion; wave-like motions of notched-up intensity that provoke a dialogue as if another real-time solo is working itself out against an elusive accompaniment.

Terry Riley’s proto-minimalist Keyboard Studies #2 made a big impact in 1960s Poland and is played by all three pianists in sync, which generates a ripened tone. Christian Wolff’s Tilbury 3 playfully deconstructs and elongates simple triads, while Zygmunt Krauze’s One Piano Eight Hands runs stock harmonic sequences on a detuned piano with the pedal held down throughout: a crippled Romanticism blinks through an enveloping cloak of sustained overtones – all the right notes, but existing inside an increasingly alien context.