Nightfall

Pianist Alice Sara Ott hones in on the music of three French composers responding in their own ways to the mystery, beauty and solitude of the night. With Ott’s playing stunningly restrained and controlled, Debussy’s charmingly innocent Rêverie contrasts with his setting of Verlaine’s melancholic meditation on the light of the moon. Three of Satie’s most hypnotic works prelude a display of Ott’s incredible sense for musical colour and texture in Ravel’s technically challenging Gaspard de la nuit, a wildly imaginative and compellingly played setting of poems about heartbreak, death and fear. Ravel’s heartfelt pavane brings the album to a dreamy close.