Like him or loathe him, Olli Mustonen has one of the most distinctive pianistic personalities of our day, and he plays the music of his great fellow-countryman with unarguable conviction.

He has admittedly cherry-picked some of the best examples of that uneven oeuvre. As Erik Tawaststjerna’s booklet note rightly claims, the 10 pieces of Op 58 (composed in 1909) contain ‘the most ambitious and greatest achievements of Sibelius’s piano work,’ and Mustonen is not one to understate their adventurous qualities. The way he juxtaposes brooding lyricism with flippant, throwaway lightness makes the opening ‘Rêverie’ sound almost like Scriabin, while the following ‘Scherzino’ is as quirky as a Prokofiev Sarcasm.

‘Secluded pastoral’ (according to Tawaststjerna) is about the last thing that comes to mind in Mustonen’s account of ‘The Shepherd’, which points up unexpected affinities to the most acerbic of Debussy’s Préludes. As for ‘tender, romantic pictures’ elsewhere in this set, Mustonen just about manages to keep his Puckish instincts sufficiently in check. But that is precisely the fascination. Hearing the urgency and expressive angst he brings to the concluding ‘Summer Song’, you may worry that something has been imposed upon the music, but you have to concede that the playing radiates affection along with originality and enormous self-belief.

Mustonen’s nerviness and sense of mischief are rarely far from the surface. He makes the ‘March of the Finnish Jaeger Battalion’ sound more like a Ukrainian gopak than any kind of march, and his Op 34 Bagatelles and Op 76 Pieces are as capricious and flighty as Schumannesque Papillons (the butterfly image is one Sibelius himself applied to his piano pieces). The two ‘Rondinos’ show Mustonen’s pianistic wits (and Sibelius’s) at their sharpest.

No performances I have heard do more to challenge the assumption that Sibelius’s piano music is inherently unpianistic. Accordingly, and with the proviso that these are highly personal interpretations, this is a CD that can be warmly welcomed, the more so given that the recording quality is so clear and lifelike, with a nicely regulated piano set in a well-judged acoustic.