It’s not enough for Yuval Zorn to be one of today’s most distinctive symphonic and opera conductors; he’s also a fabulous pianist blessed with a natural technique and big, colourful sound. Indeed, Zorn’s debut solo CD stands out for ample and realistic engineering that conveys how the piano vividly projects across the footlights in the Banff Centre’s splendid acoustic.

Perhaps Zorn’s long experience in front of orchestras informs his intelligent parsing of the massed chords and decorative flourishes throughout Messiaen’s ‘Le merle bleu’, where the pianist’s gradations of touch and astute timing clarify the composer’s foreground and background strata. In the opening movement of Janáček’s Sonata, the top melodic line and inner voices assume independent characters, as if they were emanating from two different pianos, while Zorn gives uncommonly specific shape to the rolling bass figurations. Many pianists take the second movement’s death subtext as a cue for wan and morose interpretations but Zorn will have none of that; he manages to fuse bleakness and soaring lyricism, foreshadowing the mature style manifested in the composer’s later operas. Again, Zorn’s knack for ‘orchestrating’ at the piano serves the wild and discombobulated textural thickets throughout Villa-Lobos’s Rudepoêma well, even though picky listeners might prefer Marc-André Hamelin’s ever-so-slightly cleaner left-hand leaps and more incisively transparent climaxes (Hyperion, 10/00).

I don’t quite share Zorn’s enthusiasm for Sami Odeh-Tamimi’s Skiá, an essentially percussive exercise in clusters and tremolos that goes on too long for what it has to express. Still, Zorn’s precision and careful attention to dynamics make the best case for this music. He concludes his recital with an unusually brisk reading of the Bach/Busoni Ich ruf zu dir chorale prelude that teems with originality and arresting detail. An impressive release on all counts, and highly recommended.