Meredith Monk’s music for both solo piano and piano duo is rooted in her unique singing style, which encompasses a wide and expressively varied range of non-verbal vocal sounds. Beneath the seeming ‘minimalist’ simplicity of her forms lies a wealth of detail, nuance and gesture. The opening selection on this composer-produced disc, Obsolete Objects, features quick, rapid flurries in one piano and, in the other piano, ostinatos that play against syncopated bass notes. Ellis Island is more harmonically static, enhanced by telling shifts in register and texture. The more propulsive and invigorating Folkdance incorporates handclaps and shouts of ‘hey’, while the processional-like chords in urban march (shadow) evoke the plain-spoken yet tangy sound world of Bartók’s later Mikrokosmos.

Ursula Oppens’s strong performance of the three-minute Paris incorporates dynamic, tempo and expressive changes that Monk made to the score that are not part of Anthony de Mare’s older premiere recording (Koch International). Similarly, Oppens’s reading of St Petersburg Waltz comes off sounding more foreboding and mysterious next to Nurit Tilles’s genial lyricism in an earlier ECM recording. I do prefer Tilles’s faster, playful interpretation of Monk’s 1986 Window in 7’s on ‘Do You Be’ to Bruce Brubaker’s more literal deliberation, even though his performance reflects the composer’s 2008 definitive edition. So does the 1989 Phantom Waltz for two pianos: Brubaker and Oppens’s scrupulous austerity brings out the music’s Satie-like undertones, yet there’s something to be said for the lighter, more conversational premiere CRI recording featuring Tilles again with pianist Edmund Niemann. Still, Brubaker and Oppens unquestionably satisfy the composer’s desire to fuse expressivity and restraint.