Newman: Piano Sonatas Nos 1, 4, 6 and 10: Michael Finnissy

In the 1980s, Chris Newman was a familiar (if eccentric) figure on the British contemporary music scene, forming a "chamber-punk rock band" and singing his strange little songs, which disregarded all the conventions of musical continuity, to his own piano accompaniments. He now lives in Berlin and describes himself as a multimedia artist and performer. This selection of his piano sonatas ranges right across his composing career and shows how he has kept his quirky way of selecting his raw material and assembling it. The first sonata often sounds like pastiche Beethoven, though the grammar is weird and the structural logic erratic; its central movement, titled The Dinosaurs Roamed the Planes [sic] in Herds, seems to belong to another work altogether. The other three works that Michael Finnissy plays bring in pre-existing music - not as quotation or cultural reference, Newman insists, but because "they provide the best material for the job". So Sonata No 4 from 1990 takes a sonata by CPE Bach and dislocates the left-hand part from the right to create all kinds of discontinuities - "a way of fucking up the chronology to put it into a solid state with itself", Newman says. The 10th Sonata combines rhythms from Edgard Varèse's massive orchestral Amériques with pitches from songs in Schubert's cycle Die Winterreise, so that the music seems teasingly familiar but remains just out of focus. It is strange and disconcerting: raw-edged, uncompromising in its way, and hard to get to grips with, but equally hard to ignore. Finnissy clearly believes in its worth; his performances have exactly the muscularity and aggressive edge that seem part and parcel of Newman's aesthetic.