Timing can sometimes be cruel. Only a couple of months ago I was blown away by Mitsuko Uchida’s fiery and fearless reading of Schumann’s Second Sonata. Jon Nakamatsu doesn’t lack impetus and he certainly has a convincing grasp of the ebb and flow of this work, giving the first movement great energy. Though there’s some eloquent voicing in the Andantino, it lacks a consistent pulse; and while the remaining two movements are highly propelled, Uchida finds more emotional angst in the Scherzo and more tenderness in the finale’s more inward moments.

For the remaining works on the disc, Nakamatsu turns to two of Schumann’s most potent sets of character pieces, both inspired by the notion of the masked ball. There’s plenty of imagination in his readings but sometimes it perhaps comes a little too close to caricature: in the fourth number of Papillons, for instance, which is relatively slow and trenchant, especially when compared with Hamelin – a wonderful and slightly undersung interpreter of Schumann’s music. And the closing number has less melancholic regret than Hamelin’s, Nakamatsu’s clock-chimes breaking through the texture in a brutal return to reality.

In Carnaval, too, this new recording lacks the magic of the finest, be they Anda, Uchida or Hamelin, all of whom find a greater degree of playfulness, not least in numbers such as ‘Pantalon et Colombine’. There’s less air in the textures in the more fingery pieces (the opening of ‘Paganini’ or the blink-and-you-miss-it ‘Pause’), and while ‘Chopin’ is nicely done, ‘Chiarina’ could be more tender. In the final number, the triumphant Philistine-scattering march, Hamelin has much more propulsion, Nakamatsu taking a slower tempo that makes it sound all a bit world weary. Uchida, slightly more legato than either, also sounds in no doubt as to who the winners are.