The four works are presented in reverse order of composition, so Benjamin’s progress seems backwards, as it were. The 20-minute sonata is a quarter of a century old, written the year Margaret Thatcher took charge of the then-teenaged composer’s home country. It features big-scale virtuoso runs in the treble, à la Messiaen (Benjamin’s teacher), tempered by a more tonal pull, and a phantasmagorical refraction of the Debussy Préludes and Études. Thrilling stuff which stands up well, but the Three Studies from 1982–85 are gentler and more subtle, this time closer to a supercharged Ravel Miroirs, especially in the big opening “Fantasy on Iambic Rhythm” and the quiet, sensual obsessions of “Meditation on Haydn’s Name.” The “Relativity Rag” closes out the set with Debussyish ragtime, made to limp, dance on one leg, then vanish. Benjamin works like a conjuror here, but he also prefigures the Baltic and post-Soviet Russian schools, yet with an unmistakable French accent. Even the Webern studies that preceded the “six canonic preludes” making up 2001’s Shadowlines are subsumed into the Impressionistic bouillabaisse, though Schoenberg’s op. 11 is close by. Benjamin had actually been looking at the first movement of Webern’s symphony, one of my favorite stretches of music by anyone, filled with light, and movement. Shadowlines doesn’t sound like Webern, and there is a portrayal of loss and aging in the expressive register of the music that is most affecting in the context of his other, youthful work, recorded here. More of Proust, or Baudelaire’s Spleen, than musical associations in Shadowlines.

Viola, viola is 10 minutes of terrific, intense, memorably overlapping dialogue from 1997. Here, with strings, a hint of English light (Tippett’s Corelli Fantasia, actually) does break through for a moment. The scintillating playing and the opulent Nimbus acoustic help give the music-making a live feel. This is probably the most immediately attractive item on the disc, a real scorcher. Benjamin used to attract criticism for being too much the clever Wunderkind and hence superficial (we Brits don’t like clever people very much, especially if they go to France), but all this music is vital, sensuous, instantly enjoyable, and thought-provoking—profound, even, with hindsight, though he’s still only in his early forties, with the best, likely as not, yet to come. Recommended, especially to devotees of French keyboard élan, and for Viola, viola.