Little known on this side of the Channel, like most of his French contemporaries, Michaël Lévinas (b1949) has pursued an active career as pianist and composer. Stylistically, his music leans towards ‘spectral’ harmony – while being closer to Tristan Murail than the late Gérard Grisey in its emphasis on sound less as a means to expressive ends than as an end in itself. Works such as Ouverture pour une fête étrange have an excessiveness bordering on anarchy, but the pieces recorded here focus – single-mindedly, but never perversely – on specific musical elements and processes.

Les Lettres enlacées (‘Intertwined Letters’) is the title of four separate works dating from 2000, in which overlapping melodic lines chart a scalic progression through instrumental registers, employing devices such as canon and micro-intervals to articulate the trajectory. The even-numbered works are an apposite pairing: heard at its most distilled on the solo viola of II, the process is then acoustically ‘amplified’ by the string quintet of IV – resulting in music alive in expressive gestures if restricted in emotional expression. The Three Etudes (1991) are more playful in demeanour – not least the second piece, drawing maximal variety from a single note by way of damping and resonance across the entire keyboard. Anaglyphe (1995) furthers this idea in its variations on a ‘secret motif’, a test piece teasing out the virtuosity inherent in the instrument as much as of the player. Etude sur un Piano-Espace (1977) is a vivid early example of electro-acoustic interaction, the piano as sounding instrument and resonating chamber in one.

Performances are as authoritative as one would expect from players committed to new music. Instructive couplings, too: violist Gérard Caussé effortlessly integrating rhetoric and rumination in Hindemith’s solo sonata, and joined by Lévinas in an unforced account of the 1919 sonata – the first work where the composer found his stylistic niche. Spacious and well focused, Aeon’s sound is a model of instrumental recording. On the Accord CD, Lévinas provocatively juxtaposes his music with the first six of Ligeti’s Etudes – finding a deceptive simplicity in the tonal consonance of ‘Cordes à vide’ and harmonic succulence of ‘Arc-en-ciel’. Elsewhere, his incisiveness of response is blunted by a recording cramped in dynamics and congested in texture – preventing a recommendation alongside Volker Banfeld’s pioneering account of Book 1, or the larger collections from Aimard and Biret.

Both releases come with extensive and (more or less!) readable notes on the music and its aesthetic context. As a recital, the Aeon disc makes for cohesive and satisfying listening on its own terms. The Accord disc is more for admirers of contemporary piano music – though if it encourages wider investigation of Lévinas’ perceptive recordings of Beethoven and Scriabin, so much the better.