After three volumes of Liszt’s solo works for this label, Alfredo Perl turns his hands to works for piano and orchestra. He is unfailingly musical and produces such a burnished, golden sound that I thought the Steinway he plays might be a Bösendorfer. No flashy virtuoso he, at pains to highlight textural detail and to avoid vulgarity. Kreizberg, too, is anxious to make this a contest of equals and not a confrontation, with many supportive incidental phrases subtly underlined, an approach which pays off handsomely in the A major concerto.

Generally, though, all three performances are dull, dull, dull. The pace and tone is exemplified by the opening of Totentanz. Wherem Perl is a reluctant tourist, Nelson Freire grabs you by the hand, eager to show you all the sights (though even he cannot match Raymond Lewenthal and the aptly terrifying first sforzando cymbal crash which, if you’ve never heard it, I promise will make you jump out of your skin) and doing so more than two minutes quicker.

I have no objection to the von Sauer magisterial approach but from the outset of the E flat Concerto, compared with Richter, Katchen or the peerless Freire, Perl is earthbound. After the initial cadenza, Kreizberg, symptomatically, brings the orchestra in a nanosecond late (he is not alone on disc). It takes a few minutes for everyone to wake up. The scintillating quasi-trillo passages of the last movement fail to tingle the spine. Of the three works, the A major concerto comes off by far the best but, again, enervating passages intrude and distract: listen to the L’istesso tempo section of the A major’s first movement (3'56") which sounds like a yeti wading through molasses. Performances, then, by no means without merit but which, in the concert hall, would generate polite applause rather than acclaim.