If William Butt had played as persuasively throughout as he does in the long final movement of Britten’s Third Suite he could well have swept the board of the competition at all price levels. In what is one of Britten’s most personal and moving finales, Butt achieves a perfect balance between spontaneity and refinement, managing the difficult transition from the impassioned passacaglia material to the sequence of quoted Russian themes with unforced assurance. For much of the time, however, ‘unforced assurance’ is notable for its absence, and the central problem with Butt’s readings can be identified when comparing the overall total duration of his recording with those of the competition.

A single total in minutes is obviously a very rough guide to the interpretative approach to three works which contain 23 individual movements. But when the difference is so great – Butt takes 85 minutes to Paul Watkins’s 69 and 65 from Jean-Guihen Queyras – it is bound to have an effect, and that effect is especially clear in movements like the March and Bordone from the first suite and the fugal Andante from the second. Worse still, Butt’s tempi are often unsteady in places without rubato markings: the way he suddenly rushes ahead in the first suite’s Fugue is one case in point, the lurch forward at the ‘grazioso’ marking in the second suite’s Chaconne another. Even in the third suite the fugal Andante seems ponderous alongside virtually any other performance.

Reviewing the recent set by Watkins on Nimbus, Duncan Druce felt that Queyras was still ahead of the field, and that remains the case. Butt is recorded with almost hair-raisingly close-focus fidelity: maybe he needs music of greater expressive extravagance and technical flamboyance to bring out the best in him.