The images that Claude Marc Bourget ignites with the piano keys can be as bucolic as a field of brightly hued perennials or as violent as a raging tempest on his latest album, Second Time from Ruby Flower Records. His compositions are like pictorials of the world around us, sometimes stringing notations filled with solace and other times the trail of notes rise up in a rash blaze of fury and release pearls of heated passion. His verses are melodically seamed and articulately linked displaying an eloquence akin to Sweden’s Joachim Kuhn.

Pianists of Bourget’s class see the deeper shades of life. He has a vision that pierces the surface and peers into what burrows beneath, then exhumes those emotions and channels them into musical forms. Bourget speaks the language of nature with such perception of its inner workings that his sonic creations show a visceral compassion for its shifts in mood, even when its anger is all-consuming.

Second Time is divided into five parts: Opening, Part I, Part II, Part III, and the final piece “Rising Death.” Each composition displays Bourget’s versatility to change the direction of a piece in mid-flight, and agility to spring into action and keep the pieces continually streaming as if no breach was ever made. Bourget’s notes branch out into dazzling mazes which culminate into mountains of thick foliage and then thins out into soft reclining valleys like the segments strewn across “Plays Of Winds,” or the mazes may wander capriciously expressing panic periodically like in “Dance Of The Large Bird.” The compositions alternate between expressing anxiety mounted by grand manifestations and inner peace portrayed by light, trickling showers of notes like those laid out along “Secret Ice.” The glistening cascades of the piano keys along “Ungrund” exude an unbridled passion, which Bourget reins in along the slender droplets seeping through the crevices of “River In The Air.”

Bourget creates a balance between the deposits of rage and peacefulness in nature. His compositions channel the moods which guide nature’s course, and draws out its beauty even when confronted with its darker, brooding tirades. Second Time demonstrates Bourget’s agility as a pianist, and skillfulness to convey nature’s messages to audiences. He shows a desire for challenges, and a need to master them.