Not so much nostalgique as excentrique. Luiza Borac, whose disc of music by her fellow countryman Dinu Lipatti I welcomed in the January 2013 issue, begins nostalgically enough with a look back at pre-First World War Vienna. The gemütlich charms of Godowsky and Kreisler would seem to set the tone of the disc. But next we are thrust into Schoenbergian gloom with a first recording of the eponymous three-short-movements-in-one, subtitled Etudes de nuances, by another Romanian, Constantin Silvestri (1913 69). For nostalgia read nihilism.

We then change tack entirely for the disc’s central section: five previously unissued recordings of the Romanian tenor Ion Buzea (b1934) but which have been edited to incorporate Luiza Bora’s newly recorded accompaniment (where the piano part does not lie under the voice) while retaining the original accompaniments by three other pianists. Though skilfully done, nothing can disguise the distorted primary source (1964, live) of Buzea’s attractive lyrical voice above forte.

Next come eight Schubert-Liszt transcriptions, where Borac is able once again to demonstrate her lyrical gifts, at their best in ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ and ‘Frühlingsglaube’ but, for me, none too subtle in ‘Erlkönig’ and over-deliberate in the filigree passages of ‘Ave Maria’. To conclude? Tárrega’s Recuerdos de la Alhambra billed as the ‘first recording of a piano arrangement’ (it is by Borac herself). Cyprien Katsaris can be heard in his own arrangement on YouTube taken, I think, from a BBC broadcast, fleeter and more lightly pedalled than Borac, though her performance remains a veritable tour de force, neatly encapsulating both nostalgia and eccentricity.