The music of Catalan composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is difficult to pigeonhole, in much the same way as Erik Satie's, which it sometimes resembles. Mompou saw himself as existing outside the musical mainstream and admitted to no influence from other composers. The aesthetic of his early music understandably sounds like it grew out of Impressionism, since he studied in Paris from 1911 until the beginning of the First World War, but the piano pieces for which he is best known are mercurial enough to set them apart as the work of a composer genuinely indifferent to musical trends. The charge of Impressionist influence is given more weight by the very Impressionist orchestrations of two of his collections of evocative piano pieces written between 1915 and 1918. Manuel Rosenthal orchestrated Suburbis in 1936, the same year that Alexandre Tansman made an orchestration of four of the five movements of Scènes d'enfants. The orchestrations inevitably soften the piano's percussiveness, which gives the pieces some of their quirky charm, but taken on their own terms, the orchestral versions are lovely and are welcome additions to the symphonic repertoire, if only to introduce Mompou's work to a broader audience. The Orquestra de Cambra Teatre Lliure, led by Josep Pons, plays the scores with delicacy and abandon, as the music requires. The real revelations of the CD are the performances of two of Mompou's vocal works, Les Impropères (1963), an austerely serene oratorio punctuated by explosions of wild energy, for baritone, chorus, and orchestra, and Combat del somni (1942-1948), a setting of five Catalan poems for voice and piano, three of which the composer orchestrated with great delicacy. The lyrically intense songs have a folk-like Spanish flavor and are among the composer's most haunting and emotionally charged works. Soprano Virginia Parramon sings them with great purity and poignancy. The exquisite pieces on this CD should be appealing to anyone interested in musical mavericks of the twentieth century for whom the sensuousness of sound was a primary concern.