The five piano sonatas of George Walker (1922-2018) reveal the trajectory of his creative evolution, as well as the kind of idiomatic and resourceful keyboard-writing one might expect from a composer who also was an acclaimed piano virtuoso.

The ‘post Copland-Boulanger Americana accent’ that annotator pianist Ethan Iverson refers to in the 1953 First Sonata mainly applies to the gentle central variations movement and the spiky finale, while the dramatic opening movement reminds us that Hindemith was still in the air. The leaner 1956 Second Sonata (perhaps the most popular of Walker’s five) comprises four brief movements; the first two abound with terse, jagged counterpoint, while the third-movement Adagio’s tonal ambiguity conveys a gripping yet somewhat unsettled lyricism.

Walker’s 1975 Third Sonata is by far his most original and sonorously adventurous. What tension he creates in the central ‘Bells’ movement’s asymmetric slow-moving chords. In the ‘Chorale and Fughetta’, I love the way he pits stabbing staccato gestures against billowy sustained textures. By contrast, the Fourth Sonata’s opening movement returns to the spacious declamatory style one associates with certain piano pieces by Copland and Roy Harris, yet informed by Walker’s non-serial brand of uncompromising, strongly communicative atonality. The second and final movement features a middle section where rapid repeated-note phrases jostle one another. It’s framed by two haunting and meditative sections, where the Spiritual ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child’ obliquely appears. The compact, single-movement 2003 Sonata No 5 is essentially a four-and-a-half-minute distillation of Walker’s stylistic fingerprints.

Although Walker was not an easy musician to please, he would surely have admired and respected Steven Beck’s impeccable technique, conscientious attention to detail and thorough absorption of the idiom. And perhaps he’d cede his own recordings of the first two sonatas over to Beck’s masterful authority. I slightly prefer Frederick Moyer’s 1985 reading of No 4 (GM Recordings), where the relatively resonant recorded sound enhances the shimmering impact of this pianist’s limpid phrasing and long trills. Bridge’s closer, more detailed engineering suggests an intimate studio ambience more than a luminous concert hall. Still, this album is a major and much-needed contribution to the catalogue