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The five oblique, intimate yet strangely detached movements of Beck’s ‘Stand Still Here’ are brief, but wield considerable emotional weight. Iman says of them: “I have played Stand Still Here more times than any other work in my repertoire. Each of the five pieces that comprise the work are brief–the longest is four minutes–but Jenny Beck achieves a depth of introspection and emotional sweep that is absolutely magnetic.” The effect of these sublime miniatures is that of leafing through a sequence of faded watercolours or sepia photographs, containing ambiguous but emotionally charged images. The pieces are haunting, perhaps resonant with echoes of disembodied fragments of Romantic works that sound strangely familiar – or are they archetypal gestures, triggering memories real but distant, ancestral, or false but with the tangibility of dreams? A chord or interval sounds with the repeated insistence and hauntingly otherworldly overtones of a chiming bell, and what might be snatches of forgotten melody are etched like glowing threads against the darkling landscape, but no intelligible narrative emerges from the stillness.

Martino studied with Sessions, Babbitt, and Dallapiccola, which provides a broad category into which his music fits, though he has his own voice. Passionate, urgent dynamism, and muscular energy are characteristic of his music, as they are of Sessions’ underrated Piano Sonatas, and especially in the Impromptu movements, a sonorous, lyrical approach to dodecaphony which surely derives from Dallapiccola. The pieces are varied and fantastical in mood, richly ‘orchestrated’ in piano texture, atonal, but capable of moments of great harmonic beauty and repose. The Impromptus each explore a distinct mood – puckish and mercurial, resonant and rich in texture, sensuous and coloristic – while the work is bracketed by volatile, virtuosic Fantasies.

The fifth movement, a central Fantasy, acts as a fulcrum to the work, combining elements of both types of movement in the outer sections of the piece. In introducing Iman’s other recital disc in this catalogue (08Z024) we reflect on the rôles of Schönberg and Webern as cornerstones of the total serialism movement: here, Debussy is intriguingly (but thoroughly convincingly) presented as a precursor to the luminous, saturated, stained-glass colours of Messiaen rather than embodying the “impressionistic” pastel aquarelles to which we have become accustomed, his approach to harmony sounding bolder and more experimental than ever. The composer’s own very free, quasi-improvisatory approach to performing his music, and an in-depth study of the unconventional vocabulary of the Images, inform Iman’s performance of the work.