This awesome cycle represents one of the most exhilarating monuments to Romanticism in keyboard music and exacting explorations of piano technique. The title says it all (Deutsche Grammophon use the mistranslation, “12 Etudes in increasing degree of difficulty”). As far as I can recall, no woman has previously recorded all 12, though Janice Weber recorded the even more difficult 1838 version (that talented fraud Joyce Hatto is credited with László Simon’s superb account in the latest catalogue).

All of which leads me to wonder how this delicate slip of a young lady plays these ferocious Everests of the piano with such physical abandon. The Preludio announces her intentions – this is not going to be a wham-bang fest but a musical and muscular one – but it is followed, unfortunately, by the weakest performance here with a Molto vivace that lacks rhythmic precision (Berezovsky is masterly here – WCJ, 3/97^R). After a well coloured “Paysage” we enter the lion’s den with the wrist-crippling “Mazeppa”. She unleashes swathes of sound with the generous use of the sustaining pedal, an effect which reminded me of Ervin Nyíregyházi at the height of his passion. This becomes rather too much of a feature in the remaining eight études, for while it gives her colour and sonority, it also frequently masks a great deal of detail. “Chasse-neige”, for example, emerges as an Impressionistic wash – a valid but one-dimensional view of this masterpiece.

Overall, this is a cycle not lightly to be dismissed. Alice Sara Ott is a remarkable talent and her account is a significant achievement full of interest. In the end, though, she cannot claim the summit reached by Berman (1959), Cziffra, Simon and Berezovsky whose greater power and ability to treat even the most demanding passages with swashbuckling insouciance constitute four of the greatest of all Liszt recordings.