The last time I reviewed Inon Barnatan in these pages he was playing Schubert (Avie, 11/13), and most impressive it was, too. Here is something rather less orthodox, but constantly engaging. The idea of creating a Baroque-style suite from different composers could, in the hands of a lesser artist, been a triumph of concept over realisation – do JS Bach, Barber and Ligeti really have much to say to each other? Well yes, as it turns out.

Barnatan brings an unexpected gentleness to the Bach E minor Toccata that opens this suite, at least until the vigorous closing fugue. From Germany to England, and an Allemande full of poise and warmth from Handel’s E major Fifth Suite (how cunningly the pianist puts together his key structure). Then on to Paris, initially staying in the Baroque era for a wonderfully intimate Courante by Rameau – not an easy composer to translate to the piano, though Barnatan sounds very natural, his ornamentation just so – and François Couperin’s superbly fleet homage to the Greek hunting goddess, Atalanta, from his second book of Pièces de clavecin, and then forwards in time to the 20th century for Ravel’s exuberantly acerbic Rigaudon from his wartime Tombeau de Couperin, simultaneously a homage to his French forebears and a tribute to fallen friends, in which Barnatatan finds a great contrast between hard-edged brilliance and the softer central section.

We move briefly back to London: Thomas Adès, like Ravel, loves to meld past with present and his Blanca Variations playfully do just that, in a back story involving a competition, an opera and a mythical composer named Paradis. This is just their second commercial recording and they’re knockout, bristling with invention and playfulness, in an action-packed six minutes. That liking for setting compositional challenges on which Adès thrives is equally evident in Ligeti, as we travel to Hungary and back to the mid-20th century. His Musica ricercata really took things to extremes, the first piece in the cycle based on just two pitches, the second on three, so by the time of the 10th and 11th pieces, here played in reverse order, you have 11 and 12 tones, the 10th devilishly acerbic, the 11th a solemn fugue. Again, Barnatan is unfazed by everything being thrown at him, his virtuosity always at the service of the music. Then to New York where, just a handful of years before Ligeti, Barber was writing a piano sonata for Vladimir Horowitz. The pianist insisted on a full-on dazzling finale and Barber served him up a 12-tone fugue demanding intellectual as well as physical virtuosity. Barnatan is palpably in his element, with a real clarity to his thinking and a whole range of colours and shadings from the most delicate pianissimos to stomping fortissimos.

Brahms’s Handel Variations take us back to Germany and, like the Ravel, represent one composer’s homage to another. I do find in some performances that they can sound somewhat short-winded, as a result of the constant reappearance of an ultra-brief theme and Brahms’s constantly shifting moods. But here they really work as a whole and Barnatan is as alive to the extravagantly virtuoso moments (Vars 1, 7 and 10 for instance) as to the lyrical ones (Vars 2, 11 and 19), while there’s a sense of playfulness to the mock-martial writing in, for instance, Var 6 that ensures it never becomes hectoring. The sudden shift to the minor (Var 13) is darkly etched and he builds through the last few variations with real inevitability, with the culminatory fugue suggesting that, in common with Igor Levit, Barnatan is utterly at home in the midst of counterpoint. He’s beautifully recorded too. A winner!