Recalling in particular Stefan Vladar’s fine early recording of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (Sony, 4/92), I turned to the radically different world of his Ravel with special interest. Yet Gaspard, the centrepiece of this recital, is too generalised to engage fully with the work’s macabre and hallucinatory world. Is the opening of ‘Ondine’ sufficiently ppp to create the necessary sense of seductiveness? The end may be truly rapide et brillant but there is too little dynamic and tonal finesse to evoke Ravel’s chilling inspiration. Vladar captures much of its slow and remorseless progression of ‘Le gibet’, but ‘Scarbo’, taken at a wild and furious pace, lacks a range extending from a whispering pianissimo to a blazing fortissimo.

Jeux d’eau, too, lacks an elegance inseparable from its scintillating play of light and shade, and in the Sonatine there are hints of instability injurious to its cool and inscrutable charm. There is more feeling for that tendresse that lies below the surface of the Pavane, but the two parodies on Borodin and Chabrier are more heavy-handed than fleet and stylish. Sadly, there is little competition here for the Gaspards of Pogorelich. Thibaudet and Argerich (whose ‘Ondine’, on her live EMI recital – 2/01 – was suitably described as ‘like white-water rafting’).