With this two-CD Ravel cycle, Michelangelo Carbonara, a 31-year-old Italian pianist, enters a fiercely competitive field. Tharaud, Bavouzet and Thibaudet head the French connection, while Lortie and Angela Hewitt make a distinguished claim from Canada (French-Canada in Lortie’s case). There are inclusions and exclusions in most of these sets. Some play La valse (usually adding their own orchestral colour to Ravel’s skeleton transcription). Tharaud offers Parade, an ultra-Gallic treat, while still others give us Ma Mère l’Oye (four hands) for good measure. Carbonara’s tiny trump card is a minuet lasting just over a minute, of which the booklet-note says nothing, spending space instead on a lengthy tribute to Annarosa Taddei, another pianist.

Generally speaking, a gentle impressionist haze hangs across Carbonara’s performances, which miss a necessarily sharper edge, clarity and verve. He has a minor success in the less demanding pages, the delicate ultra-Ravelian charms of the Prélude and in A la maniere de Borodine and Chabrier, where his affection is hardly in doubt. But elsewhere there is something lax and indefinite in his way with music that cries out for a higher degree of wit and focus. His Menuet antique is hardly forte and maestoso as marked and his genteel alternative misses so much typically Ravelian dissonance and satire. Where is the glitter of, say, Thibaudet or the subtle insinuation of Lortie in Jeux d’eau? Again Carbonara hardly recreates the stir and incomprehension provoked by Ricardo Viñes’s first performance of Miroirs. In such tame hands “Alborada” outstays its welcome and, although there is a grateful retreat into the sinister shadow-land of “Le gibet” from Gaspard, there is little sense of the black arts at the heart of Scarbo’s malevolent nature. The final pages of the Toccata from Le tombeau de Couperin test a pianist whose overall caution robs such music of much of its vibrancy and pell-mell excitement. Again, more generally, playing so low in tone, without that essential première matin du monde brightness, is hardly inclusive. Brilliant Classic’s recording, unlike their presentation, is sound.