Usually a disc of César Franck’s piano music – especially one that includes the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue – would have me reaching for the tissues. As soon as those cri de coeur chords chime in early in the Prelude, there’s no saving me. But with Lugansky’s disc the main use I would find for the tissue would be to try and remove some of the dust from the matt, lustreless piano sound. The instrument itself is surely largely to blame, and the recording does nothing to supply the missing bloom or warmth. But still, you would think a pianist of Lugansky’s intuition and imagination – as his outstanding recent Debussy disc perfectly demonstrated – would still smuggle in some magic and let some poetry shine through. Not a bit of it. On this occasion he seems never fully engaged temperamentally. Arriving at the Chorale, he sounds completely indifferent to the bell-like thematic top line: hear him alongside Stephen Hough if you are in any doubt. And if you find your mind wandering during Lugansky’s fugue, that’s certainly not your fault; Hough here finds a rainbow of timbres, building each episode towards a monumental cathedral of sound.

Is it, I wonder, that Lugansky was fearful of self-indulgence, to the point where he merely sounds self-denying? With the Prelude, Aria and Finale the impression given is of a fine pianist reading from the score, not having reached the stage of any inner vision for the piece, while the best that can be said of the Prelude, Fugue and Variation (in Harold Bauer’s transcription of the organ original) is that it resists sentimentality. Nor does Lugansky’s own transcription of the second organ Chorale do much to justify the change of medium. A serious disappointment all round, I fear.