Aaron Copland’s Piano Sonata doesn’t exactly lack in first-rate recordings, yet there’s certainly room for Nathan Williamson’s commanding interpretation. The outer movements’ bold and declamatory chords often can sound bleak and monochrome but Williamson’s big, colourful sonority infuses them with resonant warmth and a soaring gravitas that befits the music’s lofty aura. In the Vivace, Williamson’s darting, asymmetric lines don’t match the scurrying incisiveness and nervous energy heard in vintage recordings by Leo Smit, Leonard Bernstein, William Masselos or William Kapell in his live 1953 Frick Collection broadcast. Still, any pianist would be happy to claim Williamson’s supple facility and suavely navigated rapid interval leaps.

Bernstein’s 1938 Piano Sonata (his largest solo keyboard effort) occasionally reveals hints of the mature composer to come in the first-movement Scherzando’s jagged rhythms and the Largo’s bitonal heart-on-sleeve lyricism. Williamson’s expansive, full-bodied phrasing throughout the second movement imbues some of the sparser textures with magisterial sustaining power and timbral heft, abetted by the concert-hall realism of Somm’s resonant recorded ambience. Listeners familiar with the joyful exuberance and generosity of Lou Harrison’s music from the 1970s onwards will find a less defined creative personality in the 1938 Third Piano Sonata’s craggier music. But the 1937 Largo ostinato is simple and beautiful, and Williamson’s big sound envelops the room.

The pianist unfolds the exposition of Charles Ives’s Three-Page Sonata with straightforward calm. If the slow pacing for the central episode causes the music to wander and the march emerging from this section is a mite heavy, Williamson lets the subsequent dissonant ragtime burlesque fly. Ives’s Celestial Railroad is essentially a reworking of the ‘Hawthorne’ movement from the composer’s earlier Concord Sonata. Williamson takes its clotted chords, ragged runs and discombobulated harmonic game plan in easy, virtuoso stride, although some may prefer Stephen Drury’s lighter touch and more petulant temperament in the work’s opening rumbling paragraphs of arpeggios (New World). In all, a release of distinction.