What fresh and intelligent programming! More importantly, what mindful pianism and stimulating musicianship Orion Weiss brings to the third release in his ‘Arc’ series. Having been familiar with the tersely atonal style that Louise Talma (1906 96) favoured in the later part of her career, the skittish tonality and unpredictable register shifts in her 1945 Alleluia in Form of Toccata surprised and delighted me. Clearly Weiss had fun jumping all over the keyboard. His way with Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy evokes more of Leon Fleisher’s angularity than Sviatoslav Richter’s massive boldness. By pedalling less than most pianists, the rotary accompaniments take on an unusual yet convincing dry-point quality that illuminates the outer movements’ intricate linear writing. While Weiss is less colourful and more cerebral than, say, Murray Perahia or Arthur Rubinstein in this work, he still commands your attention.

By contrast, Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse alternates between pointillistic and curvaceous. Dare I say that Weiss finds more textural variety, colour and emotional urgency in Dohnányi’s lovingly lilting Pastorale in comparison to the composer’s own 1956 HMV recording? The pianist’s clipped détaché phrases and astute attention to voice-leading in the Brahms F minor Sonata’s outer movements are closer to the analytic intimacy of Wilhelm Kempff than Claudio Arrau’s robustness and gravitas. He doesn’t match the shimmer and mystery of Alexandre Kantorow’s haunting Intermezzo movement, nor such tender transparency as Emanuel Ax and André Laplante display in the Andante. But his finale coda assiduously emerges from what came before, rather than sounding like a virtuosic stunt. Finally, Weiss’s measured tread in Ligeti’s ‘Arc-en-ciel’ is justified by three-dimensional independence between the hands and sophisticated calibration of each dynamic level. In sum, this well-engineered release is a worthy successor to the distinguished predecessors in this series (6/22, 1/23).