The ‘world premiere’ description on this album’s cover is slightly deceiving. Carl Vine’s four piano sonatas do indeed appear together for the first time on one disc, yet all of these works, in fact, have been previously recorded, especially the popular First Sonata.

It’s easy to hear why Vine’s music attracts young pianists. His keyboard-writing is virtuoso yet fits the fingers like a glove. His handling of tonality is sophisticated and inventive yet always accessible. He thrills and excites without becoming provocative or making listeners squirm. It may be cynical to say that conservatory students take up Carl Vine because they are afraid of Frederic Rzewski. Yet by building upon and expanding the modern conservative aesthetic set forth in tried and true 20th-century repertoire staples such as Barber’s Sonata and Prokofiev’s ‘War’ Sonatas, Vine has managed to assert his own voice.

The words ‘workmanship’ and ‘consistency’ readily apply to Xiaoya Liu’s rock-solid technical mastery and natural affinity for Vine’s idiom. She shapes the First Sonata’s opening movement with the feeling of a grand awakening, as the slow-moving chords and long cantabiles fluidly unfold, while the rapid passagework dominating much of the sonata’s remainder conveys both ease and scintillation. These qualities similarly inform the two-movement Second Sonata, where Liu’s dramatic instincts and wide dynamic range persuasively serve the music, even though I slightly prefer the balletic sweep and suppler articulation of Michael Kieran Harvey (Tall Poppies, 3/07).

The lushly lyrical Third Sonata’s first-movement Fantasia might be described as Brahms’s full-bodied textures and spiritual substance after having gone through an early 21st-century makeover. As much as I enjoyed Benjamin Boren’s worthy recording (Enharmonic), I’m drawn more to Liu’s additional flexibility and yearning inflections of phrase, along with the sharper focus of her repeated notes in the Presto finale that underline the music’s evocation of Debussy’s ‘Jardins sous la pluie’. Although one must credit pianist Lindsay Garritson for commissioning and premiering the Fourth Sonata in concert and on disc (4/20^US), Liu’s incisive, assertive and galvanic projection of the outer movements makes an altogether stronger case, together with Dynamic’s superior recorded sound and overall production values. Highly recommended.