Silvestrov’s three numbered piano sonatas span 20 years, from 1960 to 1979, and together say much about the evolution of his musical outlook. The story is not as simple as the progressive simplification that generally springs to mind with this composer. The lessons he learnt as a modernist transgressive in Kiev, following in the footsteps of Webern and Nono, stayed with him, at least in terms of sensitivity to timbre and harmonic overtones (the influence of George Crumb undoubtedly added new dimensions in the 1970s). The fact that both the First and Third sonatas include ghost-like reincarnations of a fugue reinforces the affinity across stylistic boundaries. The apparently more straightforward Classical Sonata and the first of two volumes of Children’s Music included on Simon Smith’s well-filled disc also manage to conceal as much as they reveal, though not, I feel, with comparable imaginative power (in which respect the single-movement Second Sonata is surely the standout work and the one most deserving of wider dissemination).

All these aesthetic balancing acts come not with massively demonstrative technical demands but with fanatically scrupulous notation. Vagueness or lack of intensity are fatal. Simon Smith approaches the task with dedication and sensitivity; but somewhere along the line between his touch, the piano’s tone, the acoustic and the recording, much of the music’s colouristic nuance, and hence its essential atmosphere, has been lost. Alexey Lubimov’s recording of the three sonatas for Erato – itself by no means sonically ideal – are far closer to the mark, though its scarcity means you currently have to pay a premium price.