The collected piano music of Sofia Gubaidulina has found its way onto several discs in recent years. This music comes largely from the composer's thirties when - as a contemporary of Schnittke and Denisov - she was in the process of evolving a personal idiom that, by recognising the achievements of post-war European modernism, inevitably incurred the disapproval of the Soviet authorities. Yet the Chaconne (1962) makes lucid use of age-old techniques in the creation of approachable “modern” music, while the Sonata (1965) impresses through its combining formal procedures from Prokofiev and Shostakovich with an approach to timbre and sonority that, radical for time and place, is far from iconoclastic in its sensitivity and resourcefulness. Qualities that equally describe Diana Baker's performances of these works and also that of Musical Toys (1969) - an imaginative sequence of pieces for children that evoke their respective titles through simple but never simplistic means, and to which the vividly arrested energy of Toccata-Troncata (1971) and the coruscating Invention (1974) seem almost a continuation.

A pity that Gubaidulina has written nothing further for solo piano, and also that Stradivarius could not have recorded Baker in the later piano concerto Introitus. While she is preferable to the dryly-recorded Anne Mette Staehr on Kontrapunkt, she yields to Béatrice Rauchs on BIS, whose more inclusive and spacious-sounding collection remains the prime recommendation for this repertoire. Those who opt for the present disc, cleanly recorded and copiously annotated, will find Baker an insightful and sympathetic exponent.