The most appealing thing about this disc is its title. Unfortunately that title conceals a misunderstanding. The consonance on display here is enslaved to conventional rhetoric and genres. Emancipated consonance could arguably apply to the simplicity of Pärt or Silvestrov, but that is because with those composers it is emancipated from stale familiarity by various distancing processes. Nor is there anything remotely postmodern about the pieces here recorded, as the pianist’s booklet essay fondly imagines – with a few exceptions, they are not nearly self-aware enough for that.

Not that this music is uniformly bad. Or even bad at all, if its aim is merely to provide teaching fodder for piano faculties (in which case it could, perhaps generously, be called so-so). Valery Arzumanov was a sometime Messiaen pupil, amazingly enough. It is painful to write ill of one whose childhood was spent partly in the Gulag, where his parents met, but his gift seems to reside primarily in imitating a dinner-party pianist called upon to supply background music at a moment’s notice. Leonid Desyatnikov, from whom the disc’s title derived, has much more about him, and his Echoes of Theatre has the excuse of being derived from scores composed for puppet shows. There is a poetic voice struggling to emerge from some of his pieces, set off against a brittle, Parisian cabaret relish of the kind indulged in (albeit with a good deal more edginess) by the young Shostakovich, or an occasional neo-classical flourish that recalls Pulcinella, only for that comparison immediately to highlight the difference in class. Ryabov sets himself the task of arranging more or less familiar Russian folksongs, using an idiom that rarely approaches the sophistication of his 19th-century forebears and only ever matches the most mediocre of them in inventiveness. ‘Down Piterskaya Street’ is especially painful to anyone who remembers what Stravinsky did with this song in Petrushka.

Lukas Geniušas does nothing to disguise the rudimentary quality of this music. Rather his unyieldingly harsh tone and unsophisticated phrasing highlight it, not helped by an instrument and recording quality that seem determined to reinforce the impression.