Until four years ago, only a handful of the more than 130 works Raff composed for solo piano were readily available on CD. The American AK Coburg and newcomer Grand Piano labels are among those which have since been making amends. Having made her orchestral recording debut in 2009 on two highly appealing discs of Raff’s music for the enterprising Sterling label (the Op 200 Suite for piano and orchestra, reviewed 7/10), British-Vietnamese Tra Nguyen’s first solo disc consists of three Raff world premiere recordings.

Frühlingsboten (‘Harbingers of Spring’) is 12 short character pieces written between 1850 and 1852, when the self-taught Raff was part of Liszt’s household in Weimar, acting as his amanuensis. Their debt to Schumann and Mendelssohn is obvious, though with the marked interest in counterpoint that is characteristic of Raff. Not all the pieces are equally good and some of the playing is cautious and somewhat understated. In No 11, ‘Ohne Ruh’, for instance, Nguyen not only ignores Raff’s accelerando sin’ al fine but does the opposite.

No matter, for she then ups her game and gives powerfully persuasive performances of the far better Drei Klavier-Soli, Op 74: lasting nearly half an hour, its Ballade, Scherzo and ‘Metamorphosen’ (the last much admired by Liszt) are well worth exploring. The Fantaisie in B major which follows is a real discovery in two senses: the manuscript turned up in 2010 buried among some unrelated Liszt organ works; and its beautifully melodic material (another Raff characteristic), constantly transformed by Chopinesque and Lisztian figurations, is dispatched with an assured touch and subtle colouring by Nguyen.

Vol 2 is arguably even more consistently interesting, beginning with the three thematically linked movements of the Fantaisie-Sonate of 1871, dedicated to Saint-Saëns and surely worth a place in the regular concert repertoire. After this comes the Variations on an Original Theme (Var 15 seems to be pastiche Brahms while Nos 19, 20 and the finale pay homage to Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy) and the Vier Klavierstücke of 1875, the first of these, ‘Im Schilf’ (‘In the reeds’), an étude reminiscent of ‘La fileuse’, Raff’s most popular piano work. The other three short pieces, like the Variations, are also world premiere recordings. Tra Nguyen makes the best possible case for all these works and has been well recorded on a splendidly voiced Steinway at Wyastone.