Kirill Gerstein writes a thoughtful booklet-note musing on the fact that music’s very elusiveness means that we can create our own meanings when listening to pieces. And he draws persuasive parallels between the apparently irreconcilable worlds of Mussorgsky and Schumann.

And you sense, right from the opening Promenade of Pictures, that Gerstein has considered everything: textures are rethought, phrasing pondered, while tempi are fluid and oft-changing. The Promenades become less a unifying feature and more a set of variants, their differences played up. There’s a sense of weariness at the outset, but it’s presumably intentional. I confess I found myself more than a little mystified by some of Gerstein’s interpretative decisions: his ‘Tuileries’ lacks caprice so the shocking contrast between this and the following ‘Bydπo’ is underplayed. Osborne is terrific here, and, though Andsnes’s ‘Ox-cart’ goes at an almost alarming lick, the vital contrast is still there. And while there’s plenty of detail in ‘Goldenberg and Schmuÿle’, Gerstein seems to miss the drama of it. ‘Baba-Yaga’ is not without impact but you’re not tempted to take refuge behind the sofa in the way that you do when Richter’s at the keyboard; and the ‘Great Gate’ simply isn’t imposing enough, sounding small-scale compared to Richter, Horowitz, Osborne or Andsnes. I can’t help wondering if Gerstein is perhaps over-intellectualising a work that needs to sound rawer and more blood-and-guts.

With Schumann’s music the extremes are all there in his writing, waiting to be revealed. Again, Gerstein’s reading is clearly the result of much consideration but his opening movement of Carnaval is fatally lacking in energy compared to Rachmaninov, Uchida, Hamelin or Cortot. Time and again Gerstein seemed to be trying too hard to bring across the constantly varying moods and characters of Schumann’s bal masqué. Just sample ‘Arlequin’: winsome and delightfully unpredictable in Uchida’s hands; charmlessly unsubtle in Gerstein’s. Or the ‘Valse noble’, which Hamelin nuances so finely. Gerstein’s ‘Chopin’ is more persuasive but his ‘Chiarina’ is oddly unaffectionate. And so it goes on. I kept hoping I’d warm to these readings on repeated acquaintance, but so far no luck.