This imaginatively planned recital couples two cornerstones of the repertoire with Scriabin’s decadent erosion of Romanticism and an encore: Chopin’s surpassingly beautiful Op 10 No 3 Etude. Further interest is supplied by Jean-Marc Luisada’s use of novel editions of both the Liszt and Chopin sonatas (the former from an autograph manuscript found in New York, the latter – and also the Etude – from Henle). These give us many intriguing alternatives to convention even when they hardly add conviction to Luisada’s performances.

For some, his playing will suggest a personal crusade and adventure; others will view his readings as shamelessly indulgent. The catalogue is filled to bursting with great recordings of these romantic masterpieces, making it doubly hard to accept playing where the heavy hand of the ‘interpreter’ bears down on virtually every bar. Chopin’s Allegro maestoso opening to his B minor Sonata collapses under the strain of extravagant stop-go rubato, and why start the Largo’s central sostenuto quaver flow at a radically faster, unmarked tempo? Even the great, equestrian finale is subject to distortion.

The Liszt Sonata presents the same sorry tale, with the principal theme weakly presented and disfiguring changes of tempo, dictated, I suspect, more from technical limitations than musical conviction. Scriabin’s Black Mass Sonata and the Chopin Etude, too, come close to parody. All these performances are recorded in a close and airless acoustic.