The American pianist Tzimon Barto arrives at this new disc of Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata via recordings of Schubert’s D894, Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the Brahms piano concertos, which you might assume would stand him in good stead to deal with Ives’s contrapuntal overload – but here his luck runs out.

Warning signs flash from the beginning. Barto takes a whopping 20 minute hike through Ives’s opening movement, ‘Emerson’, which could generously be termed ‘expansive’, but in reality this dawdling pace does the connective tissue of Ives’s material few favours. In his 1999 recording (Métier), Philip Mead’s chancy and malleable tempi browbeat Ives’s allusions to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, hymnody and popular songs into submission – a free flow of information also unearthed by Pierre Laurent Aimard’s comparably feral 2004 version (Warner Classics). But Barto’s approach reminds me of animated flip books where maintaining a certain speed to make Donald Duck dance is essential; otherwise he totters from side to side awkwardly.

And the problems accumulate. The second movement, ‘Hawthorne’, manages to preserve fluidity; but Barto eases off when Ives drops in his trademark ragtime band reference and, worse, imposes on it a campy pretence of swing. ‘The Alcotts’ soft-pedals, literally, the tangy ugly beauty of Ives’s polytonal chorales, while the noisy action of said pedals is irritatingly prominent in the mix. Barto has the good sense to include the ad lib viola and flute parts, but, like the opening movement, ‘Thoreau’ merely drifts rather than meandering with intent.