'I like to bring works composed in various epochs under one umbrella. I need to feel the connection between the works within a particular programme to make my interpretation more convincing.’ That’s how the young Georgian pianist Giorgi Gigashvili explains his debut solo CD’s playlist. He also says that ‘in my imagination, I related all the pieces I recorded to different kinds of love’.

To quote Tina Turner, what’s love got to do with it? Furthermore, Gigashvili’s quest for stylistic contrast and diversity results in heavy going and lopsided programme-building. Hearing the Beethoven Eroica Variations, Scriabin’s Ninth Sonata, one of the longer Messiaen Vingt Regards and the Brahms Op 117 pieces at close proximity is like eating Chinese, Italian, French and Indian main courses in one sitting. The two Scarlatti sonatas aren’t so much palate-cleansers as appetisers served to the over-sated, while Scriabin’s tedious Op 38 Waltz concludes things on an anticlimactic note.

As such, it’s best to consider each work and interpretation on its own terms. Gigashvili’s Scarlatti is suave yet not scintillating; compare his seamless D major Kk29 to Wolfram Schmitt-Leonardy’s charged dynamism (Piano Classics, 9/22) and you’ll understand my point. In the Eroica Variations Gigashvili emphasises pianistic brilliance and paragraphic sweep in the manner of Sviatoslav Richter’s early 1970s studio recording. As a result, he doesn’t bring out the linear tension, tensile drive and caustic humour one hears from Clifford Curzon (Decca, 1/72), Cyprien Katsaris (Warner, 8/90) or Emanuel Ax’s Sony remake (7/13). Var 2 is a telltale example of this, where Gigashvili glosses over the triplet figurations to the point where they are indistinguishable from the presto cadenza in regard to character. The pianist’s ritards at cadence points sometimes undermine the composer’s cumulative design, although his concluding fugue’s stinging accents and super-supple double thirds will humble mere mortal pianists.

Gigashvili treads heavily in the slower-than-usual opening motif of Scriabin’s Sonata No 9. His explosive trills are more ‘excited’ than exciting, because they overpower the left hand’s anchoring rhythm: to hear the textural elements in perfect coruscating balance, go to Horowitz (Sony), Ashkenazy (Decca, 11/75) or Hamelin (Hyperion, 6/96). He sustains the Messiaen’s opening pages beautifully, yet slightly holds back in the presque vif section, where the chordal build-up lacks the ardent ecstasy of Aimard (Teldec, 4/00), Osborne (Hyperion, 10/02) or Loriod (Erato, 4/89). The shapely animation throughout the first and third Intermezzos in Brahms’s Op 117 brackets Gigashvili’s pallid and prosaic reading of the second piece. And in the aforementioned Scriabin Waltz, he blurs that fine line between limpid and limp. In short, this gifted pianist is still a work-in-progress.