To call a piano composition “a book of colours” does rather underline the black-and-white basis of the instrument and, given the rich textural imagination of Simon Holt’s music for various ensembles and for orchestra, a disc of nothing but piano music might leave you feeling that something essential is missing. Fortunately, this programme is substantial and varied enough to prove satisfying – colouristically as well as conceptually – in its own terms.

That’s because it gives a good work-out to the most distinctive aspect of Holt’s take on musical expressionism – the Spanish flavour that results from allusions to writers and painters like Lorca and Goya, with Picasso, Miró and others in the background. Moreover, as is very clear in “Some Distant Chimes” from A Book of Colours, and also in Nigredo, Holt’s Spanishness is never more seductive than when touches of impressionistic understatement weave their way into the music’s steadily, subtly evolving forms.

Holt cultivates a surrealistic strain in the concentrated musical comedy of Klop’s Last Bite, 11 tiny movements chronicling the lethal confrontation between a complacent bedbug and a mad flea. If the title hints at Beckett-style tragedy, the music shows that wit and an abrasive contemporary style are not incompatible. The aura of menace is altogether more disturbing in the other works, however: perhaps too unremittingly so in the early Tauromaquia and Black Lanterns, but totally gripping and richly nuanced in the 16-minute Nigredo. The CD’s title links alchemy with Jungian psychology, and it’s the importance of transformation to both that gives Holt his musical cue for an absorbing journey from – it would seem – darkness to light. Rolf Hind is the perfect interpreter throughout and the Potton Hall recording is of demonstration quality.