Personally, I come to all Brahms’s piano variations, except the two Paganini sets, with a heavy heart and an overwhelming sense of duty. The Hungarian Song Variations really are dreadful. Most pianists, sensibly, avoid them. Hear them once out of curiosity and then let them gather dust.

Miss Kern is a fine pianist but not a great one. Everything is presented and prepared immaculately and one must admire her scrupulous attention to Brahms’s notation and dynamics. It would take more than this, though, to change my mind about Op 21 No 2. The Handel Variations (nearly half an hour in B flat major) strike me as a great intellectual achievement but not one of great musical poetry. Kern takes all the repeats, taking full expressive advantage of the second time round, but the performance does not take flight as it does in Jorge Bolet’s hands. With him, the final fugue is presented as the urgent, inevitable climactic outcome of what has gone before; the splendour of these pages sends a shiver down the spine.

As to the Paganini Variations, head and shoulders above the other sets, another 27 minutes almost all in the same key (A minor) emphasises the need for a break when listening to this CD. Here again, Kern’s observation of the printed page is to be applauded and she handles the infamous technical difficulties with aplomb, but I would not exchange her for Michelangeli (though in dated sound and admittedly only a selection – EMI), Nicholas Angelich (Virgin, 5/06) nor Earl Wild (Ivory Classics). The recorded sound has a resonant, clinical acoustic with the oppressive ambience of the recording studio.