It is clear from a mere perusal of the booklet accompanying this disc (which is worthy of a design award in itself) that Marino Formenti’s recital, of piano music composed over a 40-year period, will be nothing if not unorthodox. So it proves over 77 minutes – superbly realised throughout – of music guaranteed to surprise, provoke and, in the broadest sense, entertain. Certainly the blurred, bell-like resonance from which Beat Furrer’s Voicelessness emerges are as ethereal an opening to a piano recital as could be imagined. From this poetic interplay of overlapping fragments to the radio surfing of John Cage’s Music Walk is a fair leap conceptually, but fixes a frame of reference for the remainder of the disc. The two pieces by Salvatore Sciarrino which follow are themselves extremes in the output of an increasingly significant composer. In its detached chords and disembodied timbres, Lost in a City of Water is less a memorial to the departed Luigi Nono than an evocation of the place (Venice) which shaped his musical outlook: the meditative feel is blown apart by the brutal gestures of Cruel Nocturne No 2 – ‘rage, metal’ with a vengeance!Cage again: the austere contemplation of One – written the year (1987) of Morton Feldman’s death, and a potent demonstration of how, in his final decade, Cage intensified a quality of ‘otherness’ by purely musical means. The graphic ‘found’ sounds of Roman Haubenstock-Ramati’s Pour Piano are followed by the hermetic soundscape of Alvin Lucier’s Music for Piano, the ‘sonorous vessels’ of the title being of an indeterminate nature. Its two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, Georg Friedrich Haas’ Hommage à Ligeti refers pointedly to earlier music: the illusory minimalism of its dedicatee’s Selbst-portrait, the quarter-tone two-piano pieces by Ives, and the uncompromising Constructivist stance of early Mosolov and Wolpe. Nothing is Real is the title of another Lucier work – closing the disc with musings on a seminal Beatles’ number, whose gentle strains recede into the confines of a teapot. Just a state of mind? Maybe, but magical nonetheless.