Once upon a time in a distant land many years ago, a small boy was given a piano by his parents. Shortly afterwards, by chance, the boy happened to see on his parents’ small black-and-white television a cartoon featuring Tom and Jerry. It was called The Cat Concerto and featured Tom playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2. The little boy was enraptured because it was the first time he had heard the piano played like that. He decided that when he grew up he would be a classical pianist like Tom. Three decades later, the little boy’s dream had come true and he had become the most famous concert pianist in the world. He was known as Lang Lang and everything he touched turned to gold. But he never forgot the debt he owed to that old cartoon.

One day, Lang Lang decided to pay tribute to that childhood inspiration by assembling a special recording of melodies from the films of Walt Disney featuring him playing the piano, both solo and with orchestra. ‘If pianist-composers could write virtuoso transcriptions of opera and song in the 19th century’, he asked, ‘why not do the same in the 21st century using songs from the movies?’ Lang Lang himself was not able to compose these transcriptions himself, as his predecessors such as Liszt, Rachmaninov and others had done. Instead, he commissioned some people to write them for him. Inevitably, the results were variable. Several, by the likes of Stephen Hough, were sophisticated, mischievous and captured the spirit of the originals, but mostly they sounded like a cross between Liberace and Carmen Cavallaro with the over-use of the suspended cymbal trill. Leonard Pennario’s over-the-top, arpeggio-drenched Midnight on the Cliffs sounded like a masterpiece by comparison.

Make no mistake, this entertainment (available as a single disc or a two-disc Deluxe Edition with 13 extra tracks) will find a ready audience worldwide. With DG’s huge marketing budget, the Disney imprimatur and Lang Lang’s own brand to back it (has there ever been another pianist with their own brand logo on an album cover?), it will sell by the truckload. But frankly, there is little music to detain Gramophone readers and a large amount to irritate them. Cultivation of piano tone is not Lang Lang’s chief concern on this occasion. Fast generally means louder. Soft usually means indulgently slow. Among the guest contributors, Milo≈ is outstanding. Others are dire: from the forgettable score of Tarzan, Andrea Bocelli sings ‘You’ll be in my heart’ in Italian. Not something to sit through twice. Gina Alice, Lang Lang’s wife, battles against her husband’s swirling fortissimo passagework in ‘When you wish upon a star’ (she really should listen to Cliff Edwards on the soundtrack of Pinocchio for a lesson in simplicity and breath control).

I do not for one moment doubt the sincerity of Lang Lang’s musical mission. Nor do I think it is a cynically motivated project with eyes just on the cash register. If Mozart and Schubert don’t appeal, why not the immortal melodies of Franck Churchill, Leigh Harline and the Sherman brothers? But too much of the content is, frankly, tacky – the musical equivalent of putting plastic flowers on someone’s grave. My hunch is that we’ll be seeing lots of ‘The Disney Book’ in charity shops over the next year, listened to once then discarded. It’s the Da Vinci Code of compact discs. It will undoubtedly make a lot of people very happy and also leave quite a few others living happily on its dividends ever after. The End.