Mark Latimer won some publicity in 1999 with the ‘first ever live [unedited] recording’ of Alkan’s Concerto for Solo Piano – audacious, brave and musically catastrophic. It so happened that I turned to the pianist’s biography before listening to the present disc (recorded in 1994). It is not a biography calculated to put a reviewer in the most charitable frame of mind: Mr Latimer we read ‘has been compared with Barere in the USA, Horowitz [oh, not again] on the other side of the Atlantic [sic]…one of the most innovative musicians to have emerged in years…gargantuan performances of near-impossible works…unparalleled width and depth… awesome creative power…’.

With the best will in the world, there is nothing in these performances – not a single bar – that supports these wild claims. Latimer plods his way through Reger’s stifling, stodgy Bach Variations with page-turning deliberation, technically accomplished, accurate and efficient. But in music that is more enjoyable for a pianist to play than an audience to hear, you need the colouristic imagination of a Horowitz and, in this instance, the luminous, sophisticated wizardry of Marc-André Hamelin to forestall the precipitous onset of ennui.

In the livelier Telemann Variations, the aristocratic Bolet (Decca, nla) and Hamelin again (both of whom, incidentally, have the sense to eschew Reger’s endless repeats) demonstrate how much Latimer has to do before his biography matches his playing.