Throughout this delightful, heart-easing recital Valerie Tryon plays as she always has done, with peerless musical grace and fluency. There is absolutely no sense of an artist projecting herself but rather of someone happy to allow the composer his own voice, to let the music flow through her mind and fingers without intrusion or impediment.

However, such enviable absence of strain and pressure come at a price. The huntsmen may be in full cry in the Op 19 No 3 Song Without Words, yet they proceed as if happily assured of their prey, without a hint of anxiety or lack of composure. Similarly in Op 67 No 4, the bees pass from flower to flower with more contentment than urgency. In Op 82 one variation follows another in such a seamless flow that the result is enervating, even poetically complacent, almost as if Mendelssohn’s distinctive voice was taken for granted. Tryon is scrupulously true to the letter of the score but the spirit is somehow left to look after itself.

The final twist in Mendelssohn’s argument in the third of the Op 16 Fantaisies is duly noted but with such understatement that it amounts to little more than a slight raising of an eyebrow. APR’s sound is excellent but Bryan Crimp’s praise, in his charming essay, for recording sessions that were ‘relaxed, easy-going – no angst, no tantrums’ leaves one with mixed feelings.