At the risk of making a weak (but nevertheless apt) joke, Czerny did rather churn it out. One has to cherrypick carefully from his total of 861 opus numbers (a figure that hides the fact that many of these contain multiple individual movements). His incredible industry and fluency allowed his many good and inspired works to be overshadowed by a greater number of lesser works, three of which we encounter here.

The best of them is the Piano Concertino in C, Op 78, from 1824. Once Czerny has wound up the mechanism, off it goes on its merry way like a well-oiled machine, an endless stream of figurations and rhythmic motifs seamlessly joined together. The themes of all three movements have already left my memory, though the central Andantino con moto had something of the Elvira Madigan slow movement about it. In the final Rondo à la polacca, also issued as a single-movement Konzertstück for ‘the advanced student’, Rosemary Tuck spends almost all her time dancing away at the very top end of the keyboard.

As she observes in her booklet, the Fantaisie et Variations brillantes sur une Romance de Blangini offers evidence of Czerny’s considerable ability as an orchestrator, but after a darkly portentous and promising introduction, the theme for which we have been thus prepared proves to be very weak gruel. (Giuseppe Marco Maria Felice Blangini, 1781-1841, so Wikipedia tells me, was an Italian who had some success as an opera composer in Paris.) Finally comes the Concertino in A flat from 1841, another work featuring a dramatic introduction followed by a rondo with a disappointing theme. The 23 pages of my piano solo score are black with demisemiquaver runs, like a sequence of cut-and-pasted piano études, for, as Tuck avers, ‘Czerny throws the book at the pianist in a whirlwind of virtuosic challenges that continue to proliferate until the very end’.

I take my hat off to her for troubling to master these inconsequential ear-ticklers with such flair, finesse and care, though she does not share Howard Shelley’s ability to turn second-rate music into first-rate, as he does on his Czerny concerto disc (Hyperion, 5/17). This despite the presence on the podium of Rosemary Tuck’s long-standing collaborator and compatriot, the great Richard Bonynge, now 92 (though Naxos’s booklet photo makes him about 42). When is this man going to receive the knighthood he so richly merits from the new, music-loving King?