Tan Dun’s numerous large-scale dramatic and multimedia projects have rather overshadowed the instrumental genres in his sizeable output, making this collection of his piano works welcome in focusing on his music’s essence as well as enabling a chronological overview.

An inclusive one, too. Eight Memories in Watercolor (1978) is Tan’s earliest acknowledged work, evocative vignettes of Hunan province when studying at Beijing Central Conservatory in the aftermath of the Mao era, its folk-like ideas informed by elements drawn from Debussy or Bartók, ranging from the impressionist ‘Missing Moon’ to the ritualistic power of ‘Ancient Burial’. His study in New York duly affirmed Tan’s progressive leanings, exemplified by the stark timbral and textural contrasts of Traces (1988). It also afforded close contact with John Cage, in whose memory C-A-G-E- (1993) evokes one of the latter’s most enduring creations through its turning the piano into a percussive entity of startling tonal and dynamic finesse.

Of more recent pieces, Film Music Sonata (2016) reworks music for Feng Xiaogang’s epic film a decade earlier into a formally cohesive and expressively sustained four-movement design – witness the eloquence of the final ‘Only for Love’. Blue Orchid is an imaginative and stylistically revealing contribution to Rudolf Buchbinder’s ‘Diabelli Project’ (DG, 6/20), then The Fire (also 2020) unfolds as a one-movement sonata of great technical dexterity with a tangible evolution too often missing from Tan’s conceptually amorphous larger works.

Ralph van Raat plays this latter piece (written for him) with assurance and commitment, as is evident throughout. Superb piano sound further enhances a release to remind one that, despite his far-reaching ambition, Tan remains a composer of keen resourcefulness and sensitivity.