Horsley

This compendium of British Piano Sonatas has been dictated by quality and variety. There are obvious omissions, largely of composers who wrote fine music for the piano, but maybe not in the form or structure suggested by the loaded word ‘sonata’. All the works presented here show their composers’ thinking over a bigger scale than their smaller pieces might allow, so that the listener is able to indulge in the creator’s sound world and control of musical form over longer periods. Here are a dozen such works each totally representative of their composers. We can delight in the stylistic and sonic contrasts as well as revelling in their varieties of keyboard writing. Peter Jacobs