Album: Pascal Dusapin, Etudes pour Piano (Musicales Actes Sud)

In the photograph album that accompanies Vanessa Wagner's interpretations of his piano "Etudes", Pascal Dusapin's apprehensions of the world are stricken with shadowplay, quizzical compositions rendering reality abstract, 3D reduced not just to 2D, but drained of moment.

That quality is there too in these piano pieces, albeit more effectively, music lending itself more readily to quiet abstraction. The shadowplay haunting these poised, monochromatic studies recalls 20th-century masters such as Ravel, Debussy and Feldman, and in the more nervous, antsy cases like "Étude No 2", the Divertissements of Satie. "Étude No 4" is a flurry of agitated immobility, but the slower pieces are as a rule more satisfying.

Download: Etude No.1; Étude No.3; Etude No.2