At her London recital in June, Khatia Buniatishvili played a second half of virtuoso works (Chopin, Ravel, Stravinsky) that bordered on the incoherent, so frantic were her tempi and shapeless her phrasing. Then, for her first encore, she played Wilhelm Kempff’s arrangement of a Handel Minuet (it’s on this new disc). It was one of the loveliest things I’ve ever heard in a piano recital. How could someone play this simple little piece so exquisitely and yet misjudge (most of) the rest of the programme so completely? One was left wishing this gifted pianist would calm down and rethink the use to which she puts her phenomenal digital prowess.

Someone must have been listening, because Buniatishvili’s latest disc is the very antithesis of the recital, rather too much so as it transpires: a programme almost entirely in the same vein as the Handel-Kempff, that’s to say soothing, intimate and reflective. Buniatishvili produces the most ravishing, velvet-toned pianissimo, beautifully captured in Berlin’s Jesus-Christus-Kirche. The trouble is that, after 20 minutes or so of ravishing, velvet-toned pianissimo, one begins to wonder if that is all this pianist is going to reveal of herself in these 17 short works. Variety comes in the form of a Mendelssohn Song Without Words (enchanting), Ligeti’s Musica ricercata No 7, its left-hand ostinato passagework dispatched with fabulous hushed fluency, and the Slavonic Dance Op 72 No 2, in which Buniatishvili is joined by her sister Gvantsa. Too often, though, the introspection seems manufactured from without rather than within (the Brahms Intermezzo and Ravel’s Pavane), while Arvo Pärt’s concluding Für Alina must hold some sort of record for the least number of notes in a piece lasting over five minutes. The CD’s booklet, prefaced by the pianist’s gnomic musings, is discursive to a degree.