Sonata No. 1

This must be a classical music completist’s dream: a composer’s entire oeuvre for solo piano conveniently packaged on a single compact disc. The composer in question is Roger Sessions, and the music collected here spans 50 years, nearly his entire compositional career. Like Sessions’s orchestral pieces, these works are dense and expansive. The music runs the gamut from hauntingly expressive to offbeat and individualistic. In his early Sonata No. 1, melodies break orbit momentarily before getting reeled back in to tonality, all delivered with a sheen of snappy rhythms—picture a cross between Alexander Scriabin and Christopher Rouse.

—RN