How refreshing to encounter an album with a programme that demands careful through-listening rather than single-track streaming. Waltzes by Granados and Chopin bookend its three more substantial centrepieces. Granados’s Valses poéticos are utterly bewitching, and it seems extraordinary that they don’t get out more (for my money they give Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales a run for their money). Charles Richard-Hamelin is alive to their strengths, from the joyous energy of the introduction – nippier than Larrocha’s (Warner Classics) – to the soulful quality of the first waltz, which lives up to its Melodioso instruction. Schumann seems to hover over the second and fourth waltzes, the latter never becoming shouty even at its most exuberant moments, while Richard-Hamelin turns the minor key of No 3 into a solemn poem. If No 7 doesn’t have quite the fire of Larrocha, the final number sets off with due brilliance before melting back into the Melodioso of the first waltz.

The three longest pieces form the heart of the album, but they’re not equal in appeal. Chopin’s Allegro de concert (a piece over which he laboured for some years) is little more than quarter of an hour of virtuoso doodling, and the booklet note writer’s claim that ‘Parts of the coda are among the most beautiful of all Chopin’s oeuvre’ seems wildly optimistic. The two Spanish pieces are much more successful: Richard-Hamelin conveys Albéniz’s unique blend of Impressionism and Iberian folk music in La Vega to create a reading high on colour and energy – Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion) is at times emotionally a little cooler. In Granados’s Allegro de concierto – which won him a national competition – Richard-Hamelin brings an airy virtuosity that never threatens to become hard-edged; his demisemiquavers are scintillatingly effortless, even if in sheer characterisation Larrocha at times outguns him.

The Chopin waltzes form an effective endpiece, and here we can appreciate Richard-Hamelin’s combination of refinement and directness, demonstrating how naturally he speaks this language. If compared to some – Hough in particular (Hyperion) – he can be a little plain in his phrasing and colours, there’s still much to admire, from the grace of Op 64 No 2 to the dragging sorrow of the E minor, Op posth. He closes with a suitably affirmative Grande valse, Op 42, setting the seal on an album of delights.

This review originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano