Maverick French pianist Hélène Grimaud is particularly interested in the ways music can bypass rational thought processes and trigger a variety of emotional responses. Her latest album is a collection of short pieces chosen and organised around the nature of memory. Memory is a companion piece to her thematically-conceived 2016 album Water, a live recording of performances from a large-scale immersive installation at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

The pieces chosen for Memory are like fleeting ephemeral mirages, flashes of colour, “crystalline miniatures capturing time,” as she elegantly puts it. The kings of French Impressionistic musical snapshots, Debussy and Satie, feature heavily, in addition to a Chopin Mazurka, Écossaise and Waltz. Of particular interest are...