The last time I saw Peter Sculthorpe, who died in August aged 85, was two years ago when I visited the small studio behind his Woollahra house in Sydney. One wall was covered in books, while a wonderful 18th-century Japanese screen hung over a writing desk on another. Near the window was his famous Moore and Moore baby grand, which as Chris Latham writes in his insightful notes to this superb release, ‘was by no means an exceptional piano…[but] had held pride of place at the centre of his composing world for over 50 years’.

Sculthorpe had an abiding interest in Australian Aboriginal music and it is present in one form or another throughout much of his oeuvre. As he told me that day, this was not an appropriation but an absorption. ‘You have an indigenous melody that grew from the land, that was a way of looking at the land. I think about the melody and sing it to myself as a way of absorbing it, and it does change. It’s a borrowing, yes; but it also becomes my way of looking at the land – based on their way.’

Perhaps Australian pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska has absorbed Sculthorpe’s music, which she has been playing all her life, the same way. Her complete survey of the solo piano music takes us from the early, Debussy-influenced Nocturnes through simple character pieces such as Sea Chant and Left Bank Waltz, via more experimental works like Koto Music I and II, which require the performer to play the piano ‘from the inside’, to one of many versions of Djilile (an Aboriginal song from Arnhem Land), A Little Book of Hours (depicting ‘a day in the life of a Koori child growing up in south-eastern Australia’) and his final and longest solo piano work, Riverina.

Cislowska’s great gift is to pick up on the saudade inherent in this distinctive, finely crafted and for the most part lyrical music, and project it outwards in an utterly natural, unforced manner. A profoundly affecting release which will be a revelation to some, to others a homecoming.