A composer­pianist who shared teachers with Horowitz and Prokofiev‚ whose family emigrated to escape Tsarist anti­semitism‚ who enjoyed a reputation as an enfant terrible in the 1910s‚ who gave up a sensation­filled concert career for the life of a teacher­administrator‚ who drastically moderated his compositional style‚ and who continued composing into his late nineties‚ dying at the age of 108 or 109 (his year of birth is uncertain)‚ Leo Ornstein simply has to be worth hearing. Only with difficulty‚ perhaps‚ could his music live up to that life­story‚ and for all his emancipated approach to harmony and texture‚ Ornstein’s output remains ultimately more stimulating than satisfying. Debussy‚ Scriabin‚ Prokofiev‚ Bartók and Ravel are all obvious influences‚ but Ornstein’s music has little of the concentration and precision that gives their work its penetration. Nevertheless it is easy to see why some of his pieces from the 1910s (all datings are to some extent conjectural) should have aroused such enthusiasm. Not only are the titles eye­catching – Wild Men’s Dance‚ Impressions of the Thames‚ Suicide in an Airplane – but the elements of wild iconoclasm rub up rather intriguingly against the influences. Given an exponent of the class of Marc­André Hamelin‚ there is rarely a dull moment. And Janice Weber is not so very far behind him‚ lacking only a degree of verve and a comparably wide colouristic range. Happily‚ the two programmes do not overlap beyond the three short­ish pieces just mentioned. And though Ornstein’s Sonatas show his limitations as a musical thinker‚ there is still enough of his essential freewheeling spirit there to commend them as part of a rounded picture of his unruly oeuvre. Hyperion’s recording has the extra depth and bloom you would expect from a full­price production‚ though the Naxos is by no means unsuccessful. Martin Anderson’s extended and superbly informative essay (Hyperion) and Severo Ornstein’s more concentrated‚ yet equally authoritative notes (Naxos) also complement one another nicely. It’s a happy day for collectors of musical arcana when two issues of this kind don’t tread on each other’s toes.