Sergei Dukachev’s miscellany clearly aims to show his musical scope and range, whether in the virtuoso ebullience of Beethoven’s Op 2 No 3 Sonata, Ravel’s symbolist/ impressionist fantasy or in Schumann’s fragmented and kaleidoscopic romanticism. Yet variety is hardly the spice of his performances, all of which proceed in a predictable, safe-as-houses fashion that excludes much sense of character or difference.

There are many more witty or spine-tingling performances of the Beethoven on record, if few more correct ones; this could serve as an admirable model for aspiring examinees and competition candidates. Every ‘i’ is meticulously dotted, every ‘t’ crossed to perfection and yet the frisson of Beethoven’s already volatile nature is somehow missed. Page follows page in too predictable a sequence. The Ravel, too, while not error-free (4'36" in Jeux d’eau) is oddly unmemorable and there are, again many other more fleet, graceful and engaging performances on disc.

It is in Schumann’s Kreisleriana that Dukachev is most seriously miscast. His dynamic range moves comfortably from mp to mf, rarely exploring wider possibilities or extending the parameters of what we already know. The Langsam at the heart of Intermezzo 2 would hardly have shocked the ever-cautious Clara, a vigilante when it came to her husband’s wilder caprice, and is No 3 really molto agitato or No 5 truly vivace assai? The concluding gnomic dance with cross accentuation that looks ahead as far as Charles Ives is hardly pianissimo and when one turns, cruelly but inevitably, to such high-flyers as Horowitz, Anda, Lupu, Argerich and Annie Fisher you witness another imaginative dimension. The recordings are warm and full-bodied if insufficiently transparent, and the slim and indifferent accompanying notes hardly add to one’s pleasure.