The chief interest here is in what might at first sight seem an eccentric juxtaposition. But if Brahms and Schoenberg may strike conservative listeners as odd bedfellows, Shai Wosner, a young Israeli pianist, does not see any dichotomy between “old” and “new” music, but an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process. Opening with Schoenberg’s Op 25 Suite, he then intersperses Brahms’s Op 116 Fantasies with Schoenberg’s Op 19 Klavierstücke and the result is both startling and enlightening. At one level Schoenberg’s brevity and enigma contrast like so many shards of glass with Brahms’s richer expressive musings; but when you reach the Intermezzo No 5 from Op 116 the connection becomes clear. Brahms’s near-minimalist mystery is already years ahead of its time and a true prophecy of Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s work is so much more than Brahms through a distorting mirror. The performances both here and in Brahms’s Handel Variations are energetic and propulsive though needing a higher degree of colour and nuance. Wosner has a tendency to rush and jab at lyrical lines and his sound is surely too “white” or bleak for such richness. There is a loss of rhythmic focus in Variation 15 and while there is no lack of panache in, say, Variation 24, the fugue is less remorseless in its build towards exultancy than from others, most notably from Julius Katchen (Decca). So although this record is of considerable academic interest it hardly eclipses memories of Pollini’s more elegant and precise Schoenberg (DG), or the wish that Radu Lupu had included Op 116 among his superb Brahms recordings. Onyx’s sound is clear but limited in range.