There are few young pianists around today to whose latest release one looks forward as eagerly as one does to Benjamin Grosvenor’s. His temperament, taste and technique, along with his choice of repertoire, are a throwback to an earlier generation. This programme is as much a homage to ‘old forms’ as it is to his pianistic forebears. Having said that, there are elements of ‘Homages’, apart from a really badly written booklet, that are not entirely successful.

The Bach Busoni Chaconne provides an impressive and sonorous opening. This, Grosvenor seems to say, is a piano work pure and simple with no hinterland. It’s a convincing view but one that means he is not quite as responsive to Busoni’s quasi-organo figurations (especially in the final pages) as Michelangeli in his 1950 benchmark nor with quite the same textual clarity. Mendelssohn’s E minor Prelude and Fugue, a favourite of Jorge Bolet and Shura Cherkassky, is reintroduced to a new generation with a performance of breathtaking beauty while its less familiar F minor companion (No 5 of the set), with its fleet-fingered fugue (allegro con fuoco), provides further assurance that one can include Mendelssohn in piano recitals in 2016 without being locked up.

Following this is Franck’s Prélude, choral et fugue, giving Grosvenor the keyboard colourist a chance to shine, producing the most ravishing pianissimos in a magnificent account that can sit alongside Cortot and Hough. Here, though, as in the Chaconne and Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli, there is a tendency to over-pedal, giving the tone an unusually (for him) washy character, a sound that does not have the burnished quality found on the ‘Dances’ CD (9/14). In the Tarantella – notwithstanding the astonishingly articulated repeated notes – martellato octave passages are blurred, left-hand off-beats lost and note values altered. Here he is outshone by Hamelin (Hyperion, 5/11) and Hofmann (abridged, 1916).

By no means is ‘Homages’ a disappointment – most of Grosvenor’s peers would give their eye teeth to play like this – but, judging him by the standards of his live performances and earlier discs, it falls short of the best we have heard from this outstandingly gifted musician.