Incompetence, amateurism, banality and ineptitude figure largely in previous Gramophone assessments of Nietzsche’s compositional efforts. My guess is that they would be awarded a B if submitted in a folder of GCSE coursework. Most of these broken-backed album leaves do indeed date from his teenage years, when Nietzsche could evidently make his way around Beethoven’s sonatas and Schumann’s poetic cycles, but his own efforts in imitation emerge as curiously flat and monotonous in effect. Without the titles to hand, you would be hard-pressed to know whether you were listening to moonlight or marching Hungarians, flowing streams or heroic laments.

Unguarded and unpretentious is the generously worded spin of the booklet note writer, who makes little attempt to disguise such technical shortcomings. More problematically, neither does Jeroen van Veen, who is a renowned exponent of minimalist composers. A maximalist approach is what’s needed if the awkward midstream changes of direction in a piece such as Da geht ein Bach are to gather any coherent sense of momentum. Its original form as a song makes better sense, as you’d expect, in the hands of Fischer-Dieskau and Aribert Reimann (Philips, 3/96).

Later in life, Nietzsche hit upon something with a murky, descending scale motif which subsequently turns up in a sinister corner of Verklärte Nacht. Why the philosopher thought it suitable to open a Hymn to Friendship is anyone’s guess. This is the longest work on the disc, written out in seven sections of increasingly sub-Wagnerian (I mean, Nibelheim-level) effusion. Van Veen does his best for it, with generous pedalling and a well-exercised left elbow.