Admirers of Bernard Roberts’s Nimbus rec- ordings of Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues and Beethoven’s 32 sonatas will have a fair idea what to expect from the start of his new Schubert cycle: plain, honest-to-goodness musicianship that takes things very much at face value. He always allows Schubert his own voice without fuss or neurosis and there is an endearing warmth beneath his disarmingly direct, sometimes gruff, exterior.

Alas, poetry too often turns to prose, and if there is a welcome absence of eyebrow-raising idiosyncrasy such candour hardly compares with the finest most inclusive recordings of the B flat Sonata such as Mitsuko Uchida from the modern era or Artur Schnabel from an older one. Try the first movement development where Roberts’s laissez-faire jettisons much of Schubert’s profoundly luminous and pained expression. The Andante sostenuto, too, exposes a stiffness and lack of outstanding pianistic command, let alone the sort of sheen that can make the playing of the above mentioned pianists an affecting, indeed transcendental, experience. The finale’s coda is strained and under-powered and if the Scherzo is solid and dependable it is hardly vivace con delicatezza as marked.

The same limitations apply to the Klavierstücke where, again, plain-speaking does duty for more elevated qualities, for the sort of inwardness and finesse that are second nature to Maria João Pires and, most of all, to Wilhelm Kempff in his live 1969 Queen Elizabeth Hall recital (BBC Legends, 2/01). At the same time you could say that Bernard Roberts sounds much as Schubert must have sounded at one of his Schubertiads. He has written his own brief but touching notes, and Claudio’s sound is adequate rather than outstanding.