These recordings of music by the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra (b1953) have a complex history, dating from various points between July/August 2010 (Kandinsky, three movements of the Clarinet Sonata and 14 of Thirty Three Ways to Look at the Same Object) and August 2014, when the final missing movements were added. The first 16 movements of Thirty Three Ways were set down at yet another time (January 2013). Quite why this should have been the case, from a group with a close working relationship with the composer, goes unexplained in the booklet.

Fortunately, the location (KAS Music & Sound, Astoria, New York) was constant throughout, and the discontinuities of the recording process have not impaired the finished result. The piano quartet Kandinsky (2003) was the one work set down at one time, its 11 movements providing expressive snapshots of Sierra’s intense and very Latin American reactions to specific paintings by the artist (not unlike Sierra’s Turner of 2002, based on six paintings of the English pre Impressionist). The four instruments play together only in the finale, ‘Colorful Ensemble’.

The Clarinet Sonata (2005 06) – played by Moran Katz and Joel Sachs – is a real find, a very entertaining four-movement work that presents enormous technical challenges, especially for the pianist, who is often called on to play contrasting themes in different tempos simultaneously. Precisely calculated, it sounds almost improvisatory in its natural verve and swing. Sierra likes to conclude works with a Latin dance movement to trigger applause, and Thirty Three Ways has a whole series of them. This vibrant cycle for piano four hands (2005 08) is essentially a set of quicksilver variations (some slow, most swift) not on a theme but on a hexachord which Sierra metamorphoses with seemingly inexhaustible élan. The performances are splendid, the sound clear and bright.