The American pianist and composer Leo Ornstein, who died in 2002 at the improbable age of 108, remains an underappreciated figure of the early modernist landscape. His reputation as a wild man of the 1910s and ’20s owed a lot to his performing style, but these vivid and often beautiful chamber works also give evidence of his temperamental connection to the late Romantics and the French Impressionists. The 1927 Piano Quintet, most notably, combines fierce keyboard attacks and angular rhythms with fragrant harmonies and piano figurations that are straight out of Debussy. The Second String Quartet, from two years later, is even more overtly ingratiating, with lyrical melodies and lush textures—yet even there the restless underpinnings of Ornstein’s piano music shines through. Marc-André Hamelin, who has long been an eloquent champion of the composer’s keyboard work, joins forces with the Pacifica Quartet to give both pieces expressive and invigorating performances.

SFGate, USA