A self-confessed “insomniaque”, you could also say that French pianist Bertrand Chamayou is a connoisseur of the hypnagogic. Certainly, he relishes that “borderland, haunted by the most varied of emotions, from tenderness to fear, from the feeling of completeness that engenders peace of mind to the anguish of nothingness and fear of the dark”. It is, he continues in the short oneiric essay accompanying this extraordinary new recording, “these overlapping feelings, this emotional confluence, that I wanted to illustrate on this album”.

Album artwork

To devote an entire album to the nocturne is one thing. To devote an entire album to the berceuse – or cradle song, or lullaby, or Wiegenlied, as it is variously known – is, despite their common interest in things nocturnal, a...