Phillip Ramey was born in Illinois in 1939, beginning piano lessons at seven.

He studied with the Russian-born composer Alexander Tcherepnin, first at the International Academy of Music in Nice, France, then at DePaul University in Chicago; a later influence was Aaron Copland, who described the younger man as ‘a composer of real individuality, with a flair for dramatic gesture’.

Although Ramey has produced an appreciable body of orchestral and chamber music, the piano has always been his favoured medium, with seven sonatas, the substantial Piano Fantasy and numerous multi-movement sets among a solo-piano catalogue of some fifty scores – about half his musical output.

His style has its roots in the motoric athleticism of Prokofiev and Bartók, refracted through the wiry and elegant polyphony of Tcherepnin. To these early influences Ramey has brought the tangy dissonance of mainstream modernism and a Lisztian enjoyment of the grand Romantic gesture.

Ramey is also an award-winning author and writer on music, with hundreds of sleeve and programme notes produced during his 16-year tenure as Program Editor for the New York Philharmonic (1977–93).

This is the third volume in Toccata Classics’ complete series of his piano music, spanning half a century of creativity, from the early Suite of 1963 to works written as recently as 2010, and closing with a substantial work from 2008, the Piano Sonata No. 6.

To quote International Record Review: this series is “a necessary corrective in the undervalued and certainly underrecorded output of this American polymath.”