You never know what to expect from Valery Afanassiev. One year it’s the most lifeless Beethoven concerto cycle on disc, another year he’ll give you absorbingly subjective and poetic Brahms Intermezzos. His Schubert falls between these extremes. The first of the six Moments musicaux contains its fair share of artificial accents alongside some beautifully muted lyrical playing. If No 2’s rhetorical tenutos are drawn out to a fault, he still generates tension within the music’s long, introspective lines. No 3 drags with the weight of the world on its shoulders and no compensating tonal heft. Afanassiev’s plodding way with No 4’s outer sections contrasts with the way his charmless yet straightforward shaping of the major-key middle section is one of the few to make Schubert’s rhythmic displacements of phrase truly audible. While Afanassiev’s tempo for No 5 largely honours the composer’s Allegro vivace directive, some of his rhythmic articulation lapses into triplets rather than duplets. Beneath the hard-nosed surface Afanassiev presents in No 6 lies some genuinely sung-out, lilting moments: if only there were more.

Next to Clifford Curzon’s tonal finesse, Richard Goode’s supple wit and Artur Schnabel’s surging energy, the opening Allegro vivace of Afanassiev’s D major Sonata is relatively joyless. His clipped rendition of the Con moto’s main theme and its reiterations grows increasingly irritating and predictable, yet his soft playing and changes of colour to underline harmonic felicities cannot be discounted. The latter virtue redeems the Scherzo’s Trio, in contrast to the heavy-handed and choppy main section. In some ways Afanassiev’s austere, matter-of-fact treatment of the Rondo undermines the music’s childlike demeanour to convincing effect, albeit not to the more playful and magical degree of Goode’s inflections and nuances. Perhaps Afanassiev saved most of his energy and creativity for the colourful, fantasy-ridden booklet-notes he provides for this not uninteresting yet ultimately unattractive release.