This album is, quite simply put, a real surprise. Not just for the fine playing of Inna Faliks or her imaginative programming, but for the quality of the nine new works that reimagine collectively the two pianistic classics at the heart of the programme, one heard – Beethoven’s final set of Bagatelles – one conspicuous by its absence, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Curiously, each modern bagatelle (from 2017) precedes its matching Beethoven piece.

These curiosities and imbalances all combine rather well. The two sets were composed a year or two apart but are strangely complementary. The modern bagatelles cover a wide expressive range despite their brevity and are dependent on their Beethovenian source piece. Some look closely to their model (eg Golub and Hendelman), others take a looser line to create flights of fancy, such as Carlson’s gentle, jazz-inflected Sweet Nothings, which works beautifully between Krouse’s severer Etude 2A and Lefkowitz’s final Bagatelle, itself a kaleidoscope of musical characters. So far as I am aware, only Danielpour has reworked his contribution – Childhood Nightmare – further into a larger set of his own bagatelles.

It is the three works deriving from Gaspard, however, that ultimately make the strongest impression. Each is a substantial, independent concert work in its own right, playable separately – Paola Prestini’s Variations on a Spell is even a diptych (‘Water Sprite’ and ‘Bell Tolls’) – while also being workable as a composite suite. Prestini consciously reworks ‘Ondine’ and, like Timo Andres’s Old Ground, derives inspiration from the source poems by Aloysius Bertrand. If Old Ground is like a dark inversion of ‘Le gibet’, unsettling and beguiling by turn, Billy Childs’s Pursuit is a ‘Scarbo’ for the 21st century, tailored to Inna Faliks’s cultured pianism.

The performances and recording were made during the pandemic, the pianist in splendid isolation in a California studio and the editing carried out over Zoom calls in New York. There is a slightly artificial quality to the sound, but this is part of its charm. Impressive.