This two-disc release of piano music by the English composer Bernard Stevens (1916-83) is by far the most comprehensive to appear to date and, on disc two, features the playing of Stevens’s pupil Michael Finnissy, and friends Isabel Beyer and Harvey Dagul.

Not the least of its attractions is the quality of the recording and the gorgeous, lifelike piano (another feather in the cap for Potton Hall, increasingly the venue of choice for piano recordings in the UK), especially in the hands of Florian Uhlig. His liquid, crystalline tone seems ideally suited to music characterised by Calum MacDonald in his outstanding 16-page booklet essay as having ‘complete mastery of counterpoint for expressive ends [in a voice that is] capable of trenchant concision of utterance, dynamism and a warm, sustained lyricism, all of which remain highly individual in their effect’. This is most evident in some of the Five Inventions, the early Theme and Variations and some of the shorter works on disc two in which, like a latter-day Bach, Stevens demonstrates his love of combining two independent lines without any (or at least with minimal) chordal underpinning.

By way of contrast comes A Birthday Song for piano duet (1963), ‘one of the most unabashedly lyrical of all Stevens’s works…[with a] positively Schubertian grace’ (MacDonald) that should surely be better known. This is the first of 16 brief works, many of them again manifesting Stevens’s clean lines and contrapuntal skill, and ending with the late and surprisingly gritty Concertante for Two Pianos. Though not all the works are of equal importance or interest, there are more than enough to welcome wholeheartedly this enterprising and illuminating collection.