As a title, The Book of Elements gives little away. But anyone assuming that the music associated with it is bound to be forbiddingly sober and abstract will soon be disabused. There’s a marvellously flamboyant spontaneity and exuberance here, demonstrating the Scot James Dillon’s view of the elements – air, water and so on – as standing for ‘different forms of energy’. Energy is life, life is both time and transience, and the composer’s over-riding concern is with images of impermanence and flux. These determine musical processes which speak of the inherent fragility of life and of the essential sadness of attempts to construct something relatively stable and permanent in sound. In this context, spontaneity and exuberance become tinged with defiance, and the sadness is ambivalent – creativity resisting impermanence and flux though the imaginative force with which their elements are pinned down on paper.

The Book of Elements, composed between 1996 and 2003, is in five volumes with a clear formal trajectory, comprising 11, 7, 5, 3 and 1 pieces respectively. Though in one sense indicative of increasing continuity, this scheme promotes – as Dillon observes in his booklet essay – a progressive heightening of tension between continuity and change. As the forms broaden out, so the drama of the material’s involvement with patterns of insistence and disruption intensifies.

The listener is kept enthralled, not only by allusions to familiar generic prototypes – toccata or moto perpetuo at one extreme, nocturne or threnody at the other – but also by a musical language that plays with perceptions about centricity: repeated notes or chords reconfigure traditional, even tonal identities as much as they contradict them. All this is accomplished with a mastery of piano style that is the very reverse of schematic, and in which the entire history of keyboard virtuosity from Frescobaldi to Ligeti is thrown into the melting pot.

The Book of Elements began with a commission from Roger Woodward, and Rolf Hind, Nicolas Hodges and Ian Pace have all been associated with individual volumes. But it is Noriko Kawai who has become most closely involved with this music, and she offers an unfailingly persuasive realisation, helped by a recording of exemplary immediacy and atmosphere. While she has ample reserves of strength for the music’s many episodes of turbulence, the delicacy with which she plays the soft yet immensely intricate polyphony of Volume 3’s third piece (featured on this month’s cover disc) is even more remarkable. As this movement shows, the piano fascinates Dillon in the way it challenges the composer to write in more than two ‘real’ parts, one per hand, and he also manages to use all the instrument’s traditional technical devices for prolonging sound with barely a hint of musical cliché. The final dispersal of energy at the end of the fifth volume, coming as it does after a positive Hammerklavier of trills and tremolos, is one of the great moments of early 21st-century music, simply because it speaks as much of affirmation as of dissolution. It sets the seal on a memorable release.