Though the centenary of George Walker (1922-2018) a couple years ago brought a degree of belated recognition, the legacy of this remarkable American composer remains, by and large, woefully neglected. Token appearances of his early, readily accessible Lyric for Strings on programmes fail to convey the scope and compositional ingenuity of an oeuvre that consists of more than 90 published works. On that score alone, Alexandre Dossin’s two-volume project on Naxos – the first recording of Walker’s complete piano works by the same artist – commands attention. That his interpretations are informed by such deep empathy for this challenging music makes these albums indispensable.

It’s all the more remarkable that Brazilian-born Dossin, a member of the piano faculty at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, discovered Walker’s music as recently as 2021. Chancing upon the last of the composer’s five piano sonatas, he felt an immediate connection and committed to recording all of the solo piano music, which fits neatly on two discs – with room to include Walker’s magnificent Piano Concerto from 1975.

The piano was Walker’s own instrument, and he pursued a performance career following his acclaimed recital debut at New York’s Town Hall in 1945. (Walker’s recordings of standard repertoire are well worth seeking out.) Usually introduced as the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music (in 1996, for his vocal-orchestral Whitman setting Lilacs), Walker broke numerous racial barriers in his youth as well. Still, the entrenched racism of the era narrowed performance opportunities. He instead became an illustrious professor, focusing his creative efforts on composition.

The works gathered here span from the Horowitz-inspired Caprice of 1941 to Walker’s final work for solo piano from 2003, the Piano Sonata No 5 – a work of fierce yet monumental concision in Dossin’s account. Each of the five sonatas has a dramatically different personality, reflecting Walker’s varying combinations of classical formal models with his unique amalgams of modernist and vernacular idioms.

Dossin is equally at home in all of these styles. He brings out the pathos of the Adagio in the Sonata No 2 (1956), for example, and invites us to share his wonder at the sonic imagination of Walker’s piano textures in the Sonata No 3 (1975). Spatials and Spektra, two of the composer’s miniatures, explode with colour as Dossin brilliantly traces their athletic serialism. Included here is the premiere recording of the showpiece Bauble (1979), which calls for virtuoso exploitation of the pedals.

A special highlight is the Piano Concerto, performed with the University of Oregon Philharmonia under David M Jacobs. Dossin does more than navigate the piece’s dense textures and complex rhythms with assurance: he plays the role of an impassioned storyteller guiding us through Walker’s sonic labyrinth – a tightly constructed but elaborately layered edifice.