After you’ve assimilated this recording’s overly resonant sonic ambience, you’ll notice several things right off the bat. One is that Joanna MacGregor takes some but not all repeats. Another is her phenomenal finger independence and ability to make her left and right hands sound as though they’re simultaneously emerging from different pianos. Her interpretative strengths and quirks sometimes reconcile with each other and sometimes clash. Variation 2’s pronounced alternations between legato and detached articulation spill over into deliberate overpedalling at times (Var 6 similarly oozes; some will find it blurry, others sexy), while Vars 3, 4 and 8 are as animated as Bugs Bunny cartoons, and Var 11’s imitative cross-handed patterns take on a rare up-beat lilt. MacGregor parks the minor-key canon at the fifth (Var 15) in austere, straightforward neutral and introduces superfluous agogic adjustments that impede Var 17’s motoric flow. And why does she slow down for Var 20’s triplet figures? Nobody else does (so far as I know), nor does the score indicate anything to that effect.

Variation 22 unconventionally proceeds along the same lines as the ruminative, romantically lit variation that precedes it (Var 21, the canon at the seventh). Like Angela Hewitt (Hyperion, 4/00), MacGregor fills out Var 29’s bass-lines in octaves; but unlike anyone else, she bleeds Var 30’s final measures into the Aria da capo, gradually letting go of the sustain pedal as the music proceeds from a murky dream to relatively clear reality. How MacGregor’s determinedly individual touches will hold up over repeated hearings is the big question. At least her formidable pianism is more than sufficient not to require aid from a DJ and a laptop in creating this veritable “Goldbergs Remix”.