With all of the inter opus mixing and matching characterising the first five volumes of Barry Douglas’s Brahms cycle, a few stragglers from the Opp 76 and 118 Klavierstücke and seven Hungarian Dances got left behind. Not to worry: they materialise in the sixth and final volume, along with various transcriptions and study pieces.

Douglas’s hefty, full-bodied sound, built from the bottom up, befits the mellow power of Brahms’s sound world. He plays the three Op 76 selections outstandingly well, especially the C major, where his rubatos underline how the phrases often cross over the bar-lines. In the dark E flat minor Op 118 Intermezzo, most pianists focus attention on the right-hand melody and treat the rumbling left-hand lines as muted filigree. Douglas, however, does almost the exact opposite, and the effect is revelatory. His Hungarian Dances have plenty of fanciful ebb and flow, although some listeners may prefer crisper, more ebullient interpretations in the manner of Cédric Tiberghien or Julius Katchen. The little F minor Canon and the Gigues benefit from Douglas’s pointed clarity and control. Despite his more than capable performance, neither he nor any other pianist can convince me that Brahms’s literal-minded Rakoczy March arrangement isn’t a useless piece of dead weight (bring on Liszt’s 15th Rhapsody, please!).

As for Brahms’s challenging left-hand transformation of Weber’s Perpetuum mobile and the study after Chopin’s Op 25 No 2 Etude, where the quicksilver right-hand single line is rendered in sixths, Douglas is outclassed by Idil Biret’s faster, more assured and vividly detailed renditions. He holds Brahms’s left-hand transcription of the Bach D minor Chaconne together largely through nuanced rumination, emphasising poetry over the architectural concentration distinguishing Krystian Zimerman’s still unsurpassed and long out-of-print DG traversal. If you’ve been following Douglas’s often admirable yet inconsistent Brahms cycle from the start, you’ll know what to expect. That includes Chandos’s exemplary engineering.