Can Çakmur continues his Schubert-plus series with a programme of impromptus that effectively meets his aim of showing Schubert ‘at the crossroads of time’.

The before element is represented by Jan Václav Voříšek, a friend of Schubert’s and – to judge from the two selected pieces from his Op 7 set – also a fan. Voříšek’s D major Symphony has made inroads into the recorded repertoire, but his piano music rather less so. Hearing Çakmur’s affectionate performances, that really seems a pity. He finds a poetry and dreaminess that might escape others, without ever violating the essentially domestic scale of the music.

I enjoyed his D899 Schubert Impromptus – written a couple of years after Voříšek’s – even more than the D935 set on the second volume in this series (4/24). Perhaps it’s simply that Çakmur has now hit his stride and has no further need to prove himself. Perhaps I’ve acclimatised to his personal brand of affectionate musical shaping. Or perhaps I’m warming to his chosen Kawai instrument, with which he has kept faith despite the criticism it has incurred; its pleasantly tinkly, crisp tone certainly suits his manner and the music well enough, though I do find myself wondering whether it has anything to offer that period instruments do not.

Çakmur remains quite free with agogic rubato, but this now feels more natural and spontaneous, not gratuitous or self-consciously applied. That he can go so rapidly from poetic musing to fieriness further suggests that he has absorbed the narrative quality of Schubert’s ballades. His own accompanying essay shows his awareness of connections with the songs, and several more such affinities spring to mind from his playing, such as ‘Erlkönig’ for the first of the set. He makes the figuration-based second and fourth Impromptus the opposite of étude-like: that opposite being, well, impromptu-like. The G flat major No 3 is so personalised in its initial statement that one wonders how it will sustain interest in the later stages; the answer is that it becomes even more daring.

This, then, is Schubert as a natural Romantic, rather than as a Classic straining at the leash. Which makes the transition to Chopin easy and natural. By this stage I can see how some might find Çakmur’s constant restlessness tiresome or old-fashioned. But it’s really not so difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt. In the second of the set, for example, he doesn’t fall for the temptation of overplaying his hand as the march swells, so that this passage and the figurations later on – deliciously shaped – feel all of a piece. In the Fantaisie-impromptu, the added ornamentations put me in mind of the much-missed Sidney Harrison, who, if memory serves, applied improvisatory flourishes in the same piece but in different places and to subtler, more idiomatic effect.

The Kawai instrument is less well adapted to the refulgence of Scriabin. Curiously, too, Çakmur’s leisurely tempo for the first of the two Op 12 Impromptus is by no stretch of the imagination presto. Still, overall this remains a distinctive and distinguished issue.