This thoughtfully themed recital testifies to the wide terms of reference that the Romanian-born pianist Herbert Schuch has at his disposal in choosing his repertoire. The central idea of the disc is that it ‘designates the points of contact between man and God: glorification and prayer, supplication, but also sorrow and death’. The impact of bells is significant. ‘The sound of bells for me,’ Schuch says, ‘is the magical medium by means of which we try to communicate with God.’ Schuch could well have selected pieces that lay their tintinnabular credentials out on a clangorous canvas but instead he has chosen ones of a reflective disposition.

There is nothing ostentatious. Even the Liszt pieces – ‘Pater noster’, ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude’ and ‘Funérailles’ – catch the composer in self-communing mood, with Messiaen’s early Cloches d’angoisse et larmes d’adieu setting itself far apart from the jubilant sonorities and rhythms he would explore in some later works. This by no means implies a paucity of variety here. The recital is sensitively buttressed by three Bach transcriptions, and, in addition to the Liszt and Messiaen, there is further stylistic scope in Ravel’s ‘La vallée des cloches’ and in Cloches d’adieu, et un sourire that Tristan Murail wrote in Messiaen’s memory. Schuch’s mastery of colour and of summoning up the composers’ creative individuality shines different lights on his invocatory stimulus, and the entire recital is much more than the sum of its parts.