Odradek is a non-profit artist-controlled label that gives all proceeds to the artist after production and distribution costs are recuperated. Refreshing – but I wish their small studio had something bigger than a Steinway B for this uniformly excellent recital. Its bright treble is not matched by the lack of colour and resonance in the lower bass which some of Liszt’s more extravagant pages require to be heard at their best.

This, as far as I am aware, is the only release to have the ‘complete’ Verdi-Liszt (not ‘Liszt-Verdi’ as the disc title mistakenly has it) paraphrases on a single disc, though it omits the second version of ‘Salve Maria’ (from I Lombardi or, if you prefer, Jérusalem), and the Agnus Dei from the Requiem can only be accessed as a download. Frustratingly, it would have overrun the maximum disc timing by just 1'13".

It is greatly to the credit of Rinaldo Zhok (b1980, Trieste, and a name new to me) that he is able to create such a luminous singing tone in this small acoustic, even at his relatively cautious tempi (the Rigoletto Paraphrase is almost two minutes slower than Ginzburg or Thibaudet inter alia). These sometimes lead to a loss of dramatic tension – Ogdon provides this in spades in his famous 1965 recording of Réminiscences de Simone Boccanegra – but Zhok’s always elegant playing brings its own rewards, the vocal origins of the music always uppermost and the performances more deeply satisfying than many as a result.