The piano output of Salvatore Sciarrino is extensive, and this seven-year survey is an excellent way into his recent work. His is music at the margins of conventional technique and at the limits of “normal” perception – with a quizzical, even playful demeanour that actively seeks out without ever imposing itself on the listener’s attention.

The Fifth Sonata is as compendious a demonstration of Sciarrino’s idiom as might be expected from a work written for Maurizio Pollini. As the music intensifies in expression over its 14-minute span, so the range of devices extends into an array of textural complexity. A sonata “about” as much as “for” the piano, there are five different endings – two of which (that is, two performances with alternative endings) feature here: preference depends on how one perceives the sonata up to that point, and on one’s sense of the unexpected.

Polveri laterali is a calling-card with political undertones, while the Nocturnes find Sciarrino leaving no less distinctive a mark on the genre as has Ligeti on the étude. None of them toys with poetic fancy, the Notturni crudeli possessing a sense of the ominous that plays – or rather preys – on the listener’s sensibility in a distinctly “cruel” manner. It is something that Nicolas Hodges, with his fastidious touch and deft reflexes, conveys in abundance. Superbly realistic sound, with thoughtfully anecdotal notes by the composer and a helpful contextual note from David Osmond-Smith. A disc that honours the composer as surely as it incites the listener.