Although this is essentially a Liszt album – no surprise, as Batsashvili was the first female winner of the International Liszt Competition, in 2014 – it is César Franck’s Prélude, fugue et variation that you’ll surely come away humming. Well, Franck makes sure that you do, since the melancholic tune of his Prelude comes back so many times that you’re left with a new earworm. It featured in the 1984 Oscar-winning chess thriller Dangerous Moves (La diagonale du fou), and when living in France I remember many fellow students asking to play it. There is something quintessentially French (apologies to Belgian readers!) to its floating whimsy, something so Amélie Poulain-like. Batsashvili chooses Harold Bauer’s transcription of the organ original, and it is a tribute to her gifts that it could easily be taken for an original piano piece.

In general I feel Batsashvili is at her best where lyricism is called for, especially in the mid-lower registers (as in the Schubert/Liszt ‘Ständchen’ and the Schubert/Strauss Kupelwieser-Walzer), and flexibility of phrasing (as in her Bellini/Thalberg Caprice). There is plenty of technical bravura, too, but this is not always accompanied with the sense of ease and panache, of danger and abandon, that the Liszt transcriptions invite. The Gounod Faust Waltz feels inhibited compared to the clarity of large-scale vision and the sheer excitement that Lortie generates (Chandos, 2/14); nor are her dramaturgical thinking and range of orchestral colours a match for Levit in the Liebestod (Sony, 11/18).

In sum, I look forward to Batsashvili’s next recordings but also hope that she gives Lisztian (or proxy-Lisztian) repertoire a rest and explores repertoire that best plays to her poetic and lyrical strengths.