For this young Finnish prize-winning pianist to make his recorded début in so challenging and enterprising a programme is deeply gratifying. And his early pedigree is made entirely understandable throughout his programme of Schubert transcriptions by Liszt. Godowsky, Prokofiev and Busoni.

At the same time it is difficult not to emphasise that Schubert takes less kindly to arrangement than most, his profound simplicity easily compromised. True Schubertians (the late Sir Clifford Curzon, for example) might well have winced at what Godowsky does to ‘Morgengruss’ from Die schöne Müllerin, where innocence is turned into experience and a tropical efflorescence. Yet if some see such an arrangement as sacriligeous, others, less purely inclined, will celebrate an act of engaging decadence. Liszt, for all his theatricality, is much more the ardent devotee than mischief-maker, often memorably true to both his own and Schubert’s sharply opposed natures, whereas Prokofiev and Busoni’s offerings are disappointingly more deferential than genuinely re-creative.

More to the point are Siirala’s performances, which are masterly and warmly sympathetic throughout, and never more so than in Godowsky’s horrendously demanding Passacaglia on Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Even Horowitz balked before this challenge, complaining that you needed six hands to encompass such fearsome difficulties. Not so Siirala, who manages superbly with two, his musical breadth and assurance making you concentrate on qualities above and beyond Godowsky’s virtuoso achievement, (though even Siirala is surpassed in strength and opulence by Hyperion’s Rian De Waal).

All Siirala’s performances are of a special freshness and distinction. Heard in Naxos’s impressive sound, he makes you look forward to further discs in the widest repertoire.