Were this my introduction to Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, I would come away well pleased. It seems to tick all the boxes for a performance of the virtuoso Romantic showpiece that it is: forthright soloist with excellent fingers (sparkling in the scherzando passages), precise, full-blooded support from the orchestra, strongly characterised playing from a pianist who is fully in tune with Rachmaninov’s idiom.

What’s not to like? Well, quite a few things if you compare Anna Fedorova with benchmark recordings by the composer, Janis, Wild, Hough and Malcolm Binns (on a long-deleted World Record Club LP surely ripe for reissue). A litany of small but questionable musical decisions, a piano whose place in the sound picture keeps the listener at arm’s length and a lack of some essential orchestral detail militate against the newcomer’s complete success. Whether it be the composer’s opening razor-sharp octave salvo (his 1939/40 recordings) or Binns’s heroic cadenza in the first movement, Fedorova and Pitrenas come off second best. Fedorova follows the concerto with a selection of four Preludes, beautifully capturing the echt Russian melancholy of the F sharp minor Prelude and unbridled ecstasy of the B flat major, both from Op 23.

The Paganini Rhapsody struck me as heavy-handed and lacking in playfulness. Of course, it’s a serious work; but Rachmaninov inserts myriad flashes of tongue-in-cheek humour (not least those famous last two bars, which go for nothing here) providing a contrast with the more solemn material such as the ‘Dies irae’ variation. Woodwind details in tuttis are often obfuscated. Again, like the Concerto, taken as a whole it’s a perfectly fine performance that falls short of the best. Channel Classics divides the work into seven sections for their track-listing instead of the usual practice of programming the work as a single track or allotting one per variation.