GÉRARD PESSON (b.1958): La lumière n'a pas de bras pour nous porter, Vexierbilder II, Vexierbilder Rom, Butterfly's Note-Book, 3 Pièces, 3 Petites Études mélancoliques, Dispositions furtives, Folies d'Espagne, Musica Ficta (9 excerpts), Excuse my dust.

Description: Pesson uses the piano to create enigmatic shadow-figures, ambiguous line drawings, in sound. Simple little repeated gestures, intervals, even single notes, and pregnant silences, produce a delicate impressionism - sometimes shattered by a fierce percussive stroke, but instantly restored. The piano's resonance is used, and sometimes tapping and scraping on keys or frame simulates a percussion instrument, or preparation of the piano unlocks a new dimension of timbral possibilities. Pesson is something of a musical magpie, it seems, fascinated by shiny fragments of other music - a chord or rhythmic gesture from Messiaen; a tapped rhythm that could be from South America, or Africa, or jazz; a couple of notes or chords that could be from a classical or romantic composition, taken out of context; musical 'found objects'. Sometimes the music seems to be desperately signalling in some mechanical language of lost or unknown meaning. Never less than intriguing, a very individual and unusual æsthetic - and it has to be said, one that is frequently very approachable and downright entertaining, for all its modernist eclecticism. Alfonso Alberti (piano).