If you struggle to make some sort of sense of Doomin Kim’s new Warner Classics release of Mendelssohn’s solo piano music, you’re not alone. There are blithe lyrical sections, spinning uninflected melodies that seem free of emotional impetus. Passagework flies by in perfect nonchalance, heedless of any affective context. Once a tempo is established, whatever the underlying colour or mood, the music ticks by with metronomic regularity. On the basis of these performances, one could be forgiven for imagining that Felix Mendelssohn, one of the architects of musical Romanticism, was little more than an early 19th-century journeyman tracing a bland path between pillar and post.

But who is Doomin Kim? There are four photographs in the booklet, yet not a single word of biography. For that, you must look online. At the Warner website you will learn that the South Korean pianist, now 16 years old, moved to Paris in 2016, where he studies with Michael Wladkowski at the École Normale de Musique. Since the booklet indicates the recording was made in October 2017 in Bois-Colombes, France, Kim was presumably 14 at the time.

So why the rush to record? For this, Kim’s advisors must answer. Mendelssohn’s piano music cannot be described as off the beaten path, and therefore relatively safe territory for a newcomer. The stunning 2008 Mendelssohn disc of Bertrand Chamayou (Naïve, 10/08), which includes some of the pieces Kim also plays, comes immediately to mind. One is left to ponder whether, in encouraging Kim to record at this tender stage of his development, those responsible may have done him a grave disservice.