The last time Wojciech Waleczek appeared in these pages was in May 2015, when he and violinist Voytek Proniewcz came up with an interesting programme of little-known Liszt works including the Duo Sonata, S127. In this piece and elsewhere, I wrote, Waleczek is kept pretty busy and ‘gives every indication of enjoying the challenges’. Unfortunately, on this new disc, far from giving the impression of enjoyment, he seems daunted by the challenges, meeting them with caution in some of the most flat-footed, pedestrian performances of these studies I have heard.

The running order is exactly the same as that on Goran Filipec’s disc (Naxos, 6/16), even down to the concluding filler of the Variations on The Carnival of Venice; the nine original (1838) Paganini Études are preceded by the six more familiar studies in the revised and slightly simplified versions of 1851. Filipec’s was a disc I welcomed last year and marginally preferred to Leslie Howard’s Hyperion disc recorded 20 years ago (despite the latter’s superior booklet). I readily admit that speed is not the be-all and end-all of virtuoso pieces but it counts for an awful lot when the whole raison d’être is to dazzle and astonish. A few comparisons will suffice: Filipec in Nos 1 3 of the revised version – 4'30", 5'10" and 4'28" respectively; Waleczek in the same studies – 5'25", 5'55" and 5'07". Filipec’s Carnaval de Venise – 5'22"; Waleczek’s – 6'41". Trifonov’s Paganini-Liszt studies on his recent two-CD set (DG, 10/16) falls somewhere between the two but is alive with mischief and imagination.

Waleczek produces a rich, burnished tone and has been very well recorded but his is not ultimately, I’m afraid, a competitive version.