Seong-Jin Cho has recently been celebrated for a series of Ravel marathons, single concerts in which he played the complete solo piano music in chronological order. If you don’t know the pianist, that might seem like grandstanding. But this fastidious musician is not a show-off – and the first of these new releases, which mirrors those concerts, has little swagger.

True, as we’d expect from a Gold Medal winner at the Warsaw Chopin Competition (2015), Cho has a nearly flawless technique – check out the clarity of Gaspard’s ‘Ondine’, for example, or the astonishing dexterity of the repeated notes in the Toccata that brings Le tombeau de Couperin to a sparkling close. He’s capable of toughness, too (listen to the bite of his sharply profiled Sérénade grotesque). But for all his virtuosity, extroverted moments are rare. Although Jeremy Nicholas found that Cho ‘takes no prisoners’ in Chopin’s Scherzos (DG, 10/21), his recordings have generally been praised less for their heightened drama than for their ‘intimacy’ (Harriet Smith commenting on his Debussy – DG, 1/18) and his ‘finesse’ (HS again, on his Schubert, Berg and Liszt – DG, 5/20). And the same can be said here.

The tonal softness of the second movement of the Sonatine, the feathery lift that launches the fourth of the Valses nobles et sentimentales – moments such as these are more likely to lodge themselves in your memory than, say, the climax of ‘Une barque sur l’océan’, which seems marginally inert. His timbral variety is impressive, too (listen to the subtle echo effects at the beginning of ‘Oiseaux tristes’), as are his flexibility (certainly, he doesn’t skimp on ritardandos in first movement of the Sonatine) and his sense of nostalgia (say, in the Menuet sur le nom de Haydn or, even more touching, his magical ending to Valses nobles et sentimentales). But this is not the place to seek out the eventfulness Samson François brings to ‘Scarbo’ (Erato) – much less the ferocity that scorches Martha Argerich’s fabled reading (DG, 8/75). Nor, more troublingly, do these performances offer much wit: the smile in Bertrand Chamayou’s sparkling ‘Alborada del gracioso’ (Erato, 3/16), with its unusually vivid imitation of the guitar, is absent from Cho’s slightly sober, less pictorial account.

The hint of gravity is even more of a problem in his Concerto in G on the second release – especially when it’s held up to Yuja Wang’s helium-filled account (DG, 11/15). Yes, there’s something intriguing in the treatment of the orchestral accompaniment in the outer movements, which brings out Ravel’s cubist sympathies; but in the end, the music seems too severe. More disappointing yet is the second movement. Given Cho’s supple account of the Pavane pour une infante défunte, you’d expect him to be at home in the pensiveness here; but he turns in a distracted, deadpan reading, snubbing the cor anglais as if it were a passing stranger to whom he has nothing to say. The Left-Hand Concerto has more going for it, both in its moments of graciousness and in its passages of accumulating tension (especially at the end). But the complex irony and the jazziness seem undernourished. The concertos sound over-engineered, too – a far cry from the naturalness of the solo piano recordings.

Overall, there’s enough affecting playing in the solo works to warrant the attention of anyone who enjoys this repertoire, but the concertos are probably best left to Cho’s most ardent admirers.