Richard Uttley, in his early twenties, has put together an enjoyable programme of British music for his first solo recording: and, as it happens, the earliest work included sounds like the most radical. Tippett’s Second Sonata (1962) appeared in Stephen Osborne’s definitive set of the composer’s piano works (Hyperion, 12/07). But the Uttley performance stands up well alongside it, relishing the extreme contrasts and giving maximum weight to big moments like the keyboard-rattling glissandi. Such effects also confirm the superior quality of the University of Hertfordshire recording.

Uttley frames his programme with two quite different examples of minimalism. Chris Willis’s Burning Up gives its various repetitive segments a neo-classical aura, while Graham Fitkin’s The Cone Gatherers is more plaintive than pugnacious, as if in tribute to Satie. The early set of Five Studies by Colin Matthews also nods to minimalist routines, challenging the player with kaleidoscopic shifts of rhythm and dynamics that never settle for the merely mechanical.

The Ballade and Nocturne by Robin Holloway are relatively recent and fairly substantial, characteristically drawing energy and a sense of fantasy from allusions to 19th-century models. While the Ballade is distinctly Schumannesque, the Nocturne has a less obvious genetic profile, though Fauré seems one possible source for the obsessive, closely woven quality that dominates and intrigues. Timothy Jackson’s Variations on a Theme by William Byrd is less assured in the way it mixes Busonian flamboyance with more brittle, post-1950 gestures, finally shading down to a plain version of a Byrd pavan. It will be interesting to hear how Uttley copes with more challenging modern pianism – some Finnissy, say, or Xenakis and Lachenmann from further afield. Meanwhile, this is a promising debut.