If the outwardly enviable, note-perfect professionalism of so many of today’s pianists can leave you cold and dispirited, the reverse is true of the second two-disc volume of Artur Pizarro’s Rachmaninov cycle. Here you are invited to reconsider the true innermost nature of Rachmaninov’s genius. Refusing to grandstand, Pizarro leaves visceral virtuosity and nerve-storms to others aware only of a dark, melancholy, all-Russian introspection beneath the surface of so much outsize Romantic rhetoric. And if such a determinedly held viewpoint produces mixed results, they are rarely less than thought-provoking.

Myra Hess, alarmed by so many up-and-coming speed merchants, would surely have admired Pizarro’s lack of histrionics or wildness. Yet she might also have noted that, on the debit side, there are many moments in, say, Preludes Nos 5, 7 and 8 from Op 23, where the playing sounds tired and lethargic. Generally, Pizarro is at his finest in the most interior numbers and hearing him in the darkness of, say, the second B flat minor Prelude from Op 32 makes you realise the absurdity of an early Grove’s Dictionary verdict that ‘Rachmaninov is too cosmopolitan in idiom to be of lasting significance’. He is hauntingly warm and caressing in the G major Prelude from the same set, but why so slow and turgid in the gently syncopated allegretto of No 11? Here I found myself longing for Moura Lympany’s naturalness, her ‘delicate emotional fervour’ (in her second recording of the Preludes on both Decca and Testament).

In the florid and uneven Chopin Variations (though Var 21 is as beautiful as anything in Rachmaninov), Pizarro once more opts for gentleness rather than aplomb, though, surprisingly, he chooses Rachmaninov’s virtuoso rather than tranquil end. You will look elsewhere for greater conformity and ardour. Pizarro may not be everyone’s cup of tea (or glass of vodka) but at his best he is both courageous and poetic. Odradek’s sound is warm and, like the performances, avoids anything over-sharp or brilliant.