This is one of those albums that should catch you in the right mood and setting. If it doesn’t, then you may be tempted to file it under ‘self-indulgent sentimentality’. But give it a chance and it may just take you to a different mental plane, dotted with moments of quiet reflection, and memories of memories.

This is essentially, as Ólafsson’s notes explain, a thank-you note in the form of a musical offering addressed and dedicated to György Kurtág, now in his mid-nineties, whom he met last year. Apart from his two Bach transcriptions, Kurtág’s presence is more spiritual than physical, with his fleeting minimalist works acting as linking recitatives, a ‘compass’ that guides us through a stylistically multifaceted if emotionally rather monochrome programme. Never does the tempo surpass moderato, except for the first movement of the Bach/Kurtág Trio Sonata, here featuring Ólafsson’s wife in a homage to the Kurtág couple’s famous piano-duet performances. Hardly ever do the dynamics rise above mezzo-piano, even though the album time-travels from Bach and Mozart to Bartók and Adès, with a handful of Icelandic miniatures and the pianist’s own transcriptions thrown in. Colours are predominantly muted. Everything, in fact, is conveyed in soft focus, which sometimes arguably goes against the nature of the works, especially in the case of the Kurtág pieces – compare Ólafsson in the Játékok with the composer’s own much sharper playing (ECM, 11/97).

The second disc is exactly the same programme played on an upright piano, with the microphones so close that you hear almost as much clacking of the mechanism as the music itself. The idea is clear: intimacy, domestic music-making and a homage to distant memories of Ólafsson’s own childhood piano. Whether the outcome makes a case either for the instrument or the pianist, I rather doubt. Gimmick or experiment? Certainly this is an album that should be heard as a cycle and in the order of the disc, preferably in one sitting where ‘barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day’ and you yourself can ‘wander lonely as a cloud’.