A newcomer to the two piano-and-orchestra works here would not know or notice or, for that matter, care that the piano parts are not played exactly as Gershwin notated them. Perhaps, in any case, you feel it is perfectly in order for a soloist to add his or her own contribution to a much-loved score. If it is all right to tweak Gershwin and Mussorgsky, then why not tinker with Chopin or Schubert? In which case you will not be as bothered as me about this disc.

Right from the soloist’s first entrance in the Rhapsody you know you are in for 40 minutes of score-checking instead of being swept away by the music. In the end, I lost count of the number of disconcerting fiddly grace notes, arpeggios, octave doublings, crunching sforzandos and unwritten/arpeggiated chords that Fontaine adds to one or both works, to say nothing of his Beethovenian entry in the Concerto (the second bar of which is in fingered octaves, not a glissando). I can forgive him his tremolando in the final bar of the Concerto but not the ghastly full-blown cadenza (presumably his own) he interpolates towards the end of the first movement, nor his rough-hewn tone, nor his over-pedalling.

Ferde Grofé’s orchestral (rather than the original jazz band) arrangement of the Rhapsody encourages grandiose gestures that militate against the spirit of the piece, though the Lille woodwind and brass do their best to inject a little irreverence into proceedings. In the Porgy and Bess Suite they come into their own with an idiomatic, well recorded performance worthy of the composer.