Listening to Alexei Kornienko play Bach is like stumbling into a time warp. His hyper-romanticised approach, uprooted from cultural and historical context, arbitrarily presses notes on the page into service for all manner of personal utterance. In the case of this E minor Partita, the expressive devices employed would seem more appropriate in Chopin, Scriabin or Czerny.

Armed with the knowledge that this degree of ahistorical Bach persists in certain quarters, one ventures toward the Grande sonate pathétique, confident that, stylistically speaking, a work composed a mere two and a quarter centuries ago will land us, not on the same page perhaps, but at least within the covers of the same book. If occasions for disagreement about interpretative choices are plentiful in the Pathétique, this is at least recognisably Beethoven, albeit of a particularly Russian stamp. The overabundance of foregrounded details is meant, no doubt, to bolster the impression of a deeply personal interpretation. In terms of piano-playing per se, the performance exhibits varied and precise articulation, as well as healthy tone production, which contribute to the sonata’s highly burnished surfaces. An extraordinary degree of calculation, combined with generally moribund tempos, renders the four little Brahms pieces less than convincing.

Style in music, as in theatre and dance, is constantly evolving, a process in which each generation reconceives the canon on its own terms, ideally in light of historical investigation, with imaginative insight and a minimum of egocentricity. The interest in this recording is perhaps the example it provides of insular imperviousness to influence.