Casting any personal preferences firmly to one side, your reviewer settled down for the opening B minor Scherzo only to be sent scuttling for the score after 30 seconds to compare Chopin’s dynamics and phrasing with those of Lang Lang. Call me old-fashioned but I like to hear what the composer wrote – notation, dynamics, agogics – rather than what the pianist thinks the composer wrote or would prefer him to have written. Why make the skittering opening passagework so incoherent? Why the heavy (unmarked) accents? Why the lack of rubato in the central B major section, and why ignore the famous fortissimo shock chord that disrupts this reverie?

The first glimpse of the properly classy Chopin-playing of which Lang Lang is more than capable does not occur until the second subject of the B flat minor Second Scherzo and then again, afterwards, in the tenderly expressive delivery of the second (A major) segment. The beginning of the Third Scherzo reinforces what has become all too noticeable in Nos 1 and 2: the piano is so closely recorded as to capture the pedal action and the uncomfortable tone produced at ff and above. Effects seem to be applied externally, and though no doubt Lang Lang’s showboating will appeal to many, other pianists too numerous to mention play the Four Scherzos more appealingly.

As to The Seasons, Lang Lang is at his best in the best numbers (2, 6, 11, 12) – fine if unremarkable performances – but cannot disguise the banality of the weaker months. The second time I played this disc, a music-loving friend (who yet has never heard Lang Lang or these works) commented innocently that she might have followed the music better had she been able to see the pianist’s face. Happily for her, there is a DVD of the same programme (filmed in the Palace of Versailles). If only Lang Lang had been able to express more consistently with his fingers and feet what he does so eloquently with his face.