“After Chopin,” wrote Paderewski, “Moritz Moszkowski best understands how to write for the piano” – a view reflected in these elegantly crafted scores. The accomplished Christof Keymer is to be congratulated for gathering them all together for the first time on these two well recorded discs.

The merit of Moszkowski’s arrangements of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances over the composer’s own solo versions is to lighten the texture while retaining the sparkling character of the original duets. There is little to choose between Keymer’s performances and the excellent Esther Budiardjo’s (ProPiano, 8/03). Few of even the most dedicated transcription junkies will have come across the Mozart, Handel, Beethoven and Mendelssohn transcriptions, all of them welcome additions to the catalogue, played here with attractive lyrical warmth.

The Carmen transcription was obviously the model for Horowitz’s own and now suffers from comparison, but Moszkowski’s Liebestod paraphrase is in many ways preferable to Liszt’s. Here Seta Tanyel in both these (Collins Classics, 10/95; 12/96 – nla) and especially Michael Ponti in the latter (VoxBox) highlight Keymer’s tendency to be too much the cautious Herr Professor, even more so in the arrangement in thirds of the Minute Waltz where Fredrik Ullén (BIS, 3/01) shows him a clean pair of heels. In the final selection (“Anton Note-Squasher at the piano”), Moszkowski takes a popular Berlin ditty for a series of parodies in the style of eight composers. If no longer “simply hilarious” (a booklet claim) it is nevertheless a delightful curiosity, a fine example of the famous German sense of humour.