With so many piano recitals by the talented and the also-ran finding their way on to the market these days, this disc comes as a relief and delight. Arnaldo Cohen’s playing blazes with the risk-taking, spontaneity and urgency of a live concert. His Funérailles is a truly great performance, perfectly structured, a real sense of angry desolation, and the central ‘cavalry charge’ emerging more logically from its context than I can recall having heard. In the Rhapsody, Cohen provides the requisite bravura thrills but also does Liszt the honour of eschewing the vapidity which so many bring to it. Vallée d’Obermann emerges as an inspired dramatic tone poem, to which Cohen adds the element of white-hot improvisation; he yields little to Horowitz’s famous RCA recording (nla) in colour and temperament. The Liszt Sonata, Cohen’s second recording, mingles narrative and textual clarity with a musical maturity and heady virtuosity in the Richter class.