Markus Hinterhäuser’s complete Ustvolskaya piano sonata cycle, recorded in 1998, never did quite cut the mustard like Marianne Schroeder’s 1994 Hat Hut performances. And then, in 2006, Sabine Liebner moved Ustvolskaya interpretation to new heights with a cycle for Neos that felt intelligently integrated and sounded brazenly strepitous. So whither Hinterhäuser now?

He remains, I’m afraid to say, a definite third choice – never a disastrous, confiscate-his-instrument third, but his cycle has simply been superseded by subsequent events. Liebner never mistakes Ustvolskaya’s austere, stentorian sound world for simple greyness but Hinterhäuser sometimes slips perilously close. Through sheer physical insistence, in Liebner’s hands the Third Sonata (1952) is shell-shocked by its own existence; melodic fragments cut like serrated knives, obsessively struck chains of cluster formations make the piano resonate like you never heard before. The surface of Hinterhäuser’s performance hints at those possibilities but it’s neat and chanceless.

The Sixth Sonata (1988) reduces Ustvolskaya’s now-familiar trademark gestures to an archetypal essence. In Liebner, ghosts of sonatas past swarm; in Hinterhäuser the piece merely sounds like a sparser version of the first five. Given that Liebner also offers Ustvolskaya’s 12 Preludes, feeder works for the gestural vocabulary of the sonatas, really it’s a no-brainer.