Sergei Bortkiewicz (1877-1952) was a man born out of his time, musically and physically. He had no time for atonal or dodecaphonic music and resolutely stuck to being – as he described himself – ‘a romantic and a melodist’. The 22 miniatures which form the bulk of this disc were composed between 1940 and 1947, none of them troubled by any harmonic innovations of the preceding half a century. One can easily imagine a number of them being offered as an end-of-recital encore, or any one of the four Lyrica nova having lyrics attached.

Nadejda Vlaeva gave the North American premiere of the Second Sonata in 2007 when she also recorded it for Music & Arts, a wining recital I reviewed in October 2009. Though written in 1942, the sonata might well be mistaken for something by the young Scriabin or Rachmaninov (Bortkiewicz unapologetically quotes from the latter’s Second Piano Concerto and Kalinnikov’s First Symphony). Of course Bortkiewicz can be dismissed as a peddler of second-hand ideas or for writing a work of such lyrical profusion during the Second World War, but there are many for whom music is a comfort blanket and who will be grateful to hear a substantial (23'02") four-movement work for solo piano without being assaulted by the leftovers of the Second Viennese School.

Vlaeva plays all this with commanding authority. She can sing, she can charm, she can thunder, and she has a wonderfully innate rubato that suits Bortkiewicz’s idiom to perfection. My one reservation is the sound. I was present when Ms Vlaeva gave the German premiere of the Sonata in 2006 and she is not a pianist who produces the glassy, metallic tone at ff and above heard here (listen to the Fantasiestück No 5 or the last movement of the sonata). Piano? Microphone placement? Hall acoustic? A shame, as it militates against the complete success of an otherwise noteworthy recital.