The first thing that strikes you is the dry, unsympathetic piano sound, admittedly better on the Blu-ray film version of the recital than on the CD. Perhaps – to quote the most irritating booklet of the year – it’s the studio’s ‘adobe-like walls’ or the Steinway ‘enhanced when Mike Toia of the Big Island of Hawaii shaped current New York Steinway hammers onto it, abetting its native sonority with their old-fashioned heavy felt’. Whatever that means, it lacks bloom and depth.

The second thing one notes is that the pianist plays from digital scores displayed on a monitor. If O’Riley’s head nodding up and down like a corn-fed chicken doesn’t disengage you from the music, then what assuredly will is the arbitrary footage of ‘Chris walking in the spring snow’ and the alpine [sic] environment around the Colorado-based studio. The aim is ‘to summon up the landscapes in which the composers wrote these pieces: musical necromancy,’ says the booklet, ‘where Persephone plays the spring up [sic]’. Irrelevant. Distracting. Doesn’t work.

For those more interested in the performances, O’Riley has the full measure of Liszt’s technical demands but few of the musical ones. After an unconvincing start, the final pages of Don Juan pass by in a blur of unrelieved fortissimo and just-about-presto during which nuanced pianism is rarely on show. O’Riley includes the ad libitum passage before the ‘finale’, frequently omitted on the grounds of good taste, but oddly loses the 34 bars preceding it.

The Liebestod is a conflation of Liszt’s and Moszkowski’s arrangements with some additions from O’Riley. As for the Berlioz, a formidable challenge for any pianist, one tips the hat to O’Riley for a creditable dispatch of this most Alkanesque of Liszt’s myriad transcriptions. It is hardly surprising that the pianist thunders towards the end of the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ bathed in perspiration. O’Riley, we are told somewhat disconcertingly, learned the Symphonie fantastique after being asked by ‘Basil Twist to accompany his critically acclaimed underwater puppet show [of the same title]’. You couldn’t make it up – unlike the track timings for the Mozart and Wagner items on the back covers of both formats.