Philip Glass’s first book of 10 Études may on the surface present little more than a stroll in the park for Vicky Chow, whose superhuman efforts of virtuosity and endurance on Michael Gordon’s Sonatra (Cantaloupe, 6/18) made it one of the greatest recordings of the past decade.

Glass’s studies present their own unique set of challenges and choices, of course. Let the music speak for itself (the less-is-more approach) and one may end up with a bland, characterless performance. Add too much weight and personality, and the music’s inherently minimalist qualities disappear.

Chow achieves a near-perfect balance of both elements on this recording. Building on firm rhythmic foundations, she shapes melody and line with clarity and purpose, as heard for example in the swift interchanges between the right and left hands in the first étude, the projection of middle voices in the seventh or the songlike quality of the eighth.

As with other interpretations (Namekawa, Schleiermacher and Whitwell, for example), Chow’s performance of Glass’s set contains its own idiosyncrasies, especially regarding tempos. The propulsive Etude No 6 had me punching numbers in disbelief into an online metronome app, but Chow isn’t alone in opting for much faster speeds than those indicated on the score. Pianists such as Víkingur Ólafsson, Nicolas Horvath and Yuja Wang take similar liberties, imbuing the music with more dramatic scope, urgency and impact.

In Chow’s case, there’s also a willingness to go the opposite way by toning things down, such as in the reflective second and fourth or static fifth, or the sense of suspended animation applied to the fanfare-like tenth. And perhaps therein lies the recording’s greatest achievement. Under Chow’s hands – from the slow-fast-slow sequence of the first three to the slow-slow-fast curve of Nos 4-6, and the shift from darkness to light heard in Nos 7-10 – Glass’s set becomes a coherent and interconnected cycle rather than a set of disparate studies. It will be interesting to see what she does with Book 2.