“To me Alec Wilder represents the home of American music in the largest sense,” says Italian pianist Stefano Battaglia by way of introduction to this homage to the US composer, recorded live with his trio at Teatro Vittoria in Turin last spring. Wilder (1907–1980) wrote popular songs that were recorded by Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee among others – not to mention penning the definitive book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators (1900–1950), so he knew a thing or two about the genre. But he also composed chamber music and operas. In the accompanying notes Battaglia declares himself most interested in his ‘Art Songs’ (renderings in music of verse by the likes of Tennessee Williams) and this set is accordingly intensely poetic and shiftingly impressionistic in tone and pace, although alongside Wilder's W.B. Yeats-based ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ there's space for darkly lyrical treatments of better-known tunes such as ‘Where Do You Go?’ (previously recorded by Wilder's pal Sinatra). It's all beautifully played by this top-flight piano trio and atmospherically captured – as you'd expect – by producer Manfred Eicher and ECM.