The Dutilleux discography having grown out of all proportion to his output says much for the esteem in which his music is now held, and this release from Jean-Pierre Armengaud further increases the extensive number of options currently available for his two major piano works.

The chief interest, however, is the ballet Le loup (1953) – never before recorded in the piano version Dutilleux himself made and that, unlike its orchestral guise, he did not later withdraw. Whether or not one agrees with Armengaud that it represents the essence of this appealingly understated score, it certainly conveys the methodical consistency of the composer’s take on this darkly ironic updating of the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale – not least in the simmering emotion of its love scene or climactic forest encounter, before the tersely perfunctory ending.

The other pieces are now staples of the modern repertoire – the Piano Sonata (1948) a lucid and overtly personal amalgam of French pianistic traits stretching back some seven decades, with the Trois Préludes (1973/88) similarly distilling innovations from the post-war era and a notable instance of Dutilleux’s ability to harness nominally disparate items into a unified conception. In the former, Armengaud finds a distinctive accommodation between the vital classicism of Robert Levin and more progressive inclinations of Alexander Soares while, in the latter, his fastidious attention to timbral and textural nuance intrigues and engages – not least the deftly ironic playfulness of ‘Le jeu des contraires’. Even without those further two preludes which sadly failed to materialise, this remains a sequence of rare poise and finesse.

The sound of Armengaud’s Steinway has been realistically captured, if lacking a degree of definition in the lower register, while the annotations are extensive and informative – even though the explanatory synopsis makes Le loup seem more inane than actually is the case.