Luiza Borac, whom I first heard as a jury member at both the Viotti and Scottish International Piano Competitions, is a Romanian pianist of enviable professionalism. Her first disc was devoted to music by Enescu (11/03) and now she turns to more familiar territory, to Schubert and Liszt.

In the Wanderer Fantasy, Schubert’s single virtuoso masterpiece, Borac’s overall mastery is impressive even when her proficiency is unmatched by a complementary inwardness. In the Presto’s central respite from hyperactivity the notes march forward in impeccable order but there is little sense of uplift, of the poetry of a truer, more intuitive Schubertian. At 0’55” in the final Allegro she makes one of several understandable but unmarked pauses for breath, breaking the music’s remorseless impetus and advance.

Her Liszt, too, lacks a necessary degree of ardour. In the Sonetto 123 del Petrarca the playing is able rather than rapturous (‘I saw on earth angelic grace’) and there is too little acuteness in the Dante Fantasia. Here the opening plunge into the abyss needs a more high-pitched drama and her progress through the central dolcissimo con amore is halting and fitful, at odds with Liszt’s long, vaulting phrases. Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este, a work of mystical symbolism evoking a garden in which fountains and cypresses replace flowers, is alternately musical and pedestrian, and it is only in the Canzone from the Tarantella (Venezia e Napoli) that Borac opens up new imaginative horizons suggesting what she can do when she loses her inhibitions and responds with a more affecting warmth and emotion. High on energy, low on lyricism, these performances have been well recorded in a bold, spacious acoustic.