One challenge for a piano virtuoso who tackles Schubert is that the composer’s piano style is determined by vocal and orchestral colour more than the timbre of a keyboard instrument. To be sure, Barry Douglas’s Steinway Model D sounds about as beautiful as a modern piano can. Yet with his robust power, the pianist is sometimes tempted to inflate the scale of the music.

That soft chord which opens the G major Sonata sounds very close to the one that introduces Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto, composed 20 years earlier. After the subdued start, Douglas’s tone eventually grows ‘big’ in that spacious yet intimate opening movement (at 10'16" and 12'17") and later at the start of the Menuetto. Schubert’s firmly struck treble chords can be played full out on a large modern Steinway, but the texture implies something different: the timbre of the kind of instrument that Schubert knew, vigorous but not massively sonorous. The Irish pianist offers a musicianly and fluent account, with smoothly flowing runs and subtle rhythmic inflections.

I missed a degree of tenderness in the early E flat Sonata, where there could be more dolce (as in the opening movement’s second subject, from 1'06"), and even softer soft playing. Intriguingly, the sprawling finale here sounds almost Chopinesque in form, line and figuration.

In the final two tracks, Douglas recreates the complex textures and intricate voicing of Liszt’s transcriptions of two Schubert lieder. Here the pianist, music and instrument are in harmonious accord. Recorded sound is exemplary.