With this issue Olli Mustonen completes his cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos, once more fascinating and repelling, with an idiosyncrasy so determined that the pips squeak. Beady-eyed and provocative, his opening to the Fourth tells us that it is time to move on from the legendary poetry of Myra Hess, Gilels, Lupu and Perahia and opt for a more invigorating and modernist approach; a less sentimental evasion of the truth. Certainly his relentless staccato puts paid to the very essence of this most lyrical of concertos, and at the same time drains the Emperor of most of its breadth and grandeur.

Try Mustonen’s entry to the Fifth Concerto’s finale, where he is both pedantic and whimsical, and you may well feel that this performance is strictly for those with an alternative view of Beethoven, however self-conscious the revision. Throughout both readings the pianist’s sound billows and recedes with a nervy and unsettling brilliance so that you come to see his prodigious gifts as both a blessing and a curse. He has technique and imagination to burn and I recall with awe his earlier recordings of Balakirev’s Islamey, Rachmaninov’s First Sonata and his first album for Decca of Alkan and Shostakovich. But here in Beethoven he is surely miscast, intent largely on eccentricity and excess. Faced with such oddity the Tapiola Sinfonietta, conducted by Mustonen, retreat into an understandable reserve. Ondine’s sound is good without being outstanding.