How you respond will depend on how your like your Pictures. Uncouth, with savagery lurking round every corner? Or a little more honed? You can tell much from the way an artist sets off on the first Promenade. Lewis has quite a spring in his step, and he emphasises the sense of leading to each Picture by not tracking the Promenades separately. His ‘Gnomus’ is less grotesque than some, Kissin in particular playing up the character’s unpredictable violence. Lewis is touching, though, in his portrait of quarrelling children in the Tuileries Gardens, though I particularly like Osborne here, who gives the sense that this is a sly, digging kind of dispute. Lewis’s ‘Bydπo’ is faster than Osborne’s, though not as speedy as the supercharged oxen at the head of Andsnes’s cart. And, again, Lewis is less rapt than Osborne in ‘Con mortuis in lingua mortua’, the Scot truly otherworldly both in the degrees of pianissimo and the desolation of his stuttering close.

Kissin’s ‘Baba Yaga’ skirts caricature in its violence, whereas Andsnes is very effective precisely because he saves some of his most explosive playing for this point. Lewis, on the other hand, manages to convey both power and an inexorable quality. In the ‘Great Gate’ both Lewis and Osborne take a spacious and grandiose approach, which works well enough at the outset: the problem arises about a minute and a half in, when the descending octaves arrive. All too easily this can sound somewhat laboured; Andsnes and Kissin both gain through faster tempi. In the end, choice is very much down to taste but personally I prefer my Pictures somewhat rawer.

The Schumann (perhaps a strange coupling) has much to recommend it. It is more contained than some; but Lewis’s haloed sound and unfailing sense of thoughtfulness is winning, particularly in the opening movement. There is plenty of freedom and space to react but never at the expense of momentum (some may find Uchida too focused on Schumann’s musings here). The second movement is less propulsive than some – Annie Fischer for instance, in whose hands the final stretto is wonderfully unbuttoned. But in the finale, whereas some look merely for beauty, Lewis finds a confiding tone that gives Schumann’s phrases a speaking quality that is very touching.