For his second Chopin recital, dedicated to the memory of Vlado Perlemuter, Alexandre Tharaud once again couples one of his greatest musical loves with Mompou. Bold and fiercely analytical, this young French pianist claims in an accompanying interview that Chopin’s Preludes are “shot through with violence and death”. It is therefore surprising to find him taking such an evasive view of No 2 where his lean sonority and rapid tempo (it is marked lento) erase much sense of morbidity. There is an odd hesitancy and blurring of the glittering descents of No 10, and why elongate the opening of No 7 so that its essential simplicity is compromised? Successes include a thoughtful rather than grandly processional view of No 9 and an eruption into nightmare in the savage gusts of No 14. But elsewhere some of Tharaud’s more jagged insights go very much against the musical grain. He is, however, brilliantly committed to Mompou, to the desolation of Chopin’s already disconsolate E minor Prelude or to the sudden vehemence of the Ninth Prelude. The album includes some strangely stylised photographs of the pianist, but for Tharaud his piano has “a patina all its own”.