Edition Laura’s clumsy booklet-note may gorge on hard-sell schlock – ‘the tension [in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony] between the single creative individual and the brutal antagonistic forces of the “world” is even more poignantly expressed in Albert Breier’s version for solo piano’ – but Albert Breier has actually prepared a meticulous and discerning transcription of the opening Andante comodo.

It’s everything that Christopher White’s flabby, muddled, badly recorded version of his and Ronald Stevenson’s transcription of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (Divine Art) is not. Breier’s less-is-more strategy pulls you into the immediate. Harmonic sequences are plotted moment-to-moment and cogent choices are made about what needs editing out to allow the music to speak appropriately on the piano: the musical concentrate without its orchestral front; a harmonic pictogram sketched from the inside. Mahler’s structure can still breathe and evolve over time – unlike White’s fix-its and make-do’s.

There are, of course, compromises: high-register ‘string’ lines no longer strain against themselves, and not much can be done to re-enact the spatial ping-pong of motifs between timpani and double basses that herald the final push. But, during this last section, the brinkmanship of Mahler’s volatile harmony is traced over its naked essence: a compelling reason to hear this performance.

The pairing might seem incongruous until you think about Morton Feldman’s desire to be ‘the first great composer that is Jewish’ and, more pointedly, that pages in Mahler’s Ninth begin to resemble Feldman’s sparse, white-canvas notation. This Piano (1977) refuses to conform to the party line of acknowledged Feldmanistas like John Tilbury and Aki Takahashi. Breier doesn’t linger over those expected resonant spaces that, anyway, his dry attack precludes. What isn’t precluded is intelligent dynamic and tonal contouring, and intelligent ventriloquising of Feldman’s labyrinth.