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David Hackbridge Johnson: Piano Music. Lowell Liebermann, piano. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.

George Walker: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-5. Steven Beck, piano. Bridge Records. $17.99.

     First-rate pianists are increasingly interested in tackling music that is outside the standard keyboard repertoire, especially material by interesting composers of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. David Hackbridge Johnson (born 1963) has written hundreds of pieces, including 13 symphonies, but his music – definitely including his piano works – remains relatively little-known. Lowell Liebermann’s new Steinway & Sons release stands to remedy the neglect through world première recordings of seven Nocturnes, Bell-Fanfare, the two Barcarolle Elegies, and the six Calligraphic Poems. Johnson’s music has an immediately apparent personal style that Liebermann clearly finds highly congenial, although this does not mean Johnson’s piano works will likely find a significant new audience on the basis of this very well-recorded CD. The reason is that the same factors that a pianist would find attractive here – unusual harmonies, distinctive tone-painting, a very personal approach to tonality, constant rhythmic variation – can make the music somewhat challenging to hear. That is of course not a bad thing in itself, but listeners should be prepared for Johnson’s learned, sensitive and unusual approach to composition and to the piano. Thus, the mood of the first two nocturnes is dark, almost phantasmal – the first is called Notturno Spettrale, the second Notturno Misterioso – but the Chopin homage promised in the first piece is less than obvious. And Johnson has a very expansive view of the nocturne form, with some of these pieces running about three minutes but one (No. 3) lasting almost 11 and sounding much more like a dark fantasia. All the Nocturnes qualify as night music, but the nights they illustrate range from the calm of No. 5 to the initially relaxed but then more-disturbed No. 4 to the spooky No. 7 (“The Devil’s Lyre”), which is replete with dynamic contrasts. Bell-Fanfare is short and proclamatory, while the Barcarolle Elegies (the first Lento, the second Andante con moto) offer significantly contrasting moods. The Calligraphic Poems are perhaps the most accessible music on the disc, the shortest running less than two minutes and the longest less than four. Offering contrasting moods and motions, with considerable clarity in the piano writing, these are attractive miniatures that constantly hint at Impressionism without ever becoming strictly illustrative. Liebermann manages to treat each piece as a complete work in its own right while also fitting all six together into an attractive aural display. Johnson’s piano works, at least those heard here, show him to be a careful and thoughtful craftsman with a strong grasp of the piano’s expressive capabilities, and with little interest in display for its own sake or in making the piano sound non-pianistic (or meta-pianistic), as is the preference of a number of contemporary composers. The disc bears repeated listening in order to provide a strong sense of Johnson’s aesthetic – and for those who find the music congenial, these piano works will surely whet the appetite for works written by Johnson for other instruments.

     The five piano sonatas of George Walker (1922-2018), played by Steven Beck on a new Bridge Records CD, are less variegated than Johnson’s piano works and less revelatory of their composer’s talent. But they do chart some interesting changes in Walker’s thinking about piano music and sonata form – although not exactly in a straight line, since two of the five were revised decades after their original composition. Sonata No. 1 (1953, revised 1991) is the most classically structured of the works, in three movements with a central theme-and-variations between two faster movements. Walker is not an especially gifted tunesmith, but his skill in variation form is evident in the middle movement. His harmonic language in this sonata is fairly straightforward mid-20^th-century, as are the rhythmic irregularities that are most evident in the finale. Sonata No. 2 (1956) is in four movements, with a theme-and-variations here leading off the work. The four movements are quite short – one to three minutes each – and the sonata seems repeatedly to strain for expansiveness that it never quite attains. The shortest movement, a quicksilver Presto, placed second, has an attractive airiness about it. Sonata No. 3 (1975, revised 1996), in three movements, is the only one of these works whose movements have descriptive titles: Fantoms, Bell and Choral and Fughetta. The music is somewhat illustrative, albeit in rather obvious ways, such as the repeated chords of the second movement that are first given plenty of time to fade away, then sped up. Sonata No. 4 (1984) is in only two movements, the contrasting Maestoso and Tranquillo. By and large, the movements accurately reflect their designations for part of their duration, but Walker does not remain committed to the descriptions throughout, speeding up the first movement and disturbing the tranquility of the second, in both cases opting for variety rather than consistency of sound and mood. Sonata No. 5 (2003) is a single-movement work and by far the shortest of these pieces, lasting less than five minutes. The ways in which it is a sonata at all are less than apparent: it is a brief, fantasia-like piece that almost sounds like a somewhat grandiose encore for the conclusion of a piano recital. Certainly its compression is quite distant from the comparatively expansive approach of the first (and longest) of these sonatas, but the ways in which No. 5 is a sonata are less than evident. All five of these pieces are played by Beck with feeling and understanding, and all will be of interest to listeners who know Walker only from Lilacs, the soprano-and-orchestra work for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1996. The sonatas lack the passion and lyricism of Lilacs, but do show Walker to have a good sense of the piano’s capabilities and to be able to create effective if rather workmanlike pieces within the sonata tradition.