Emmanuel Despax offers a heartfelt tribute to his recording team and fellow musicians in this new recording of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, equating the experience to being ‘like making a movie … the artist is like an actor, the producer [Andrew Keener] is like the movie director’. Despax, a former pupil of the Yehudi Menuhin School, also talks of how he was all set to perform this work as a teenager, only to be thwarted at the last minute when the local school orchestra proved – unsurprisingly – not up to its mammoth demands. So much was riding on this recording.

And the result? Something of a mixed bag. There’s no doubting Despax’s commitment to the concerto and from the piano’s very first entry there’s an eagerness to bring out its manifold beauties. But that can come at the cost of a lack of drive, which is partly a matter of momentum but equally down to the spotlit Fazioli, which tends to dominate even in accompanying passages, resulting in a downplaying of the sense of struggle that is so central to this piece. Take the opening of the slow movement, for instance. Litton – a very empathetic concerto partner – sets an ideal pace, to which Despax responds with a slower tempo and a tendency to overdo the rubato; compare him with Nelson Freire, who joins the conversation with the Leipzig Gewandhaus and Riccardo Chailly in the most seamless manner and yet simultaneously manages to create lines of exquisite detail. Passages such as the wind-writing from 6'45" or 10'02" also count for less than they should because of the piano’s overly prominent accompanying. On the other hand, the solo viola line in the Adagio’s closing moments does come through well.

The Rondo finale sets off at a good tempo but Despax introduces a little hiccup to the rhythm in the very opening phrase which I find off-putting. The switch to B flat major for the new espressivo theme four minutes in tempts these players into a wholesale slowing down, with overly romanticised string portamentos (Freire and Chailly avoid this and are so much more effective for it). The cadenza proves that Despax has the goods, technically speaking, which makes it all the more frustrating that this doesn’t work better as an interpretation.

From the epic to the intimate, and it’s good to have the 16 Waltzes for piano duet, which Despax plays with his wife Miho Kawashima, whom he first met at the Menuhin School. The Fazioli ensures a bright sound, which they exploit to the full in the rumbustious first waltz, though in places brightness becomes an uncomfortable glare, particularly in the upper registers (such as in No 6); their tempos are occasionally a bit off – the famous G sharp minor (No 3) is a little studied and the last waltz sounds merely dogged. A tendency to speed up towards the bar line in some (Nos 4 and 13) might have worked well in concert but sounds a bit contrived on repeated listenings.