Bertrand Chamayou, on his first disc for Erato, offers a kind of Schubertiade of the mind – and it proves to be a most enticing 70 minutes. The large-scale (the Wanderer and the Drei Klavierstücke, D946) sit comfortably among the smaller-scale without a hint of incongruity or awkwardness as we move from virtuosity to spareness and from seriousness to light heartedness. And that has much to do with the pianist himself, who treats everything with equal respect and palpable affection. The Wanderer is a real test of any musician but Chamayou surmounts the work’s sometimes unpianistic demands without ever leaving you, as some do, feeling as if you’ve been punched in the face. Instead, he revels in its virtuosity and in the sheer variety of texture, grasping its structure as well as Paul Lewis does. And the way he creates pools of stillness at the start of the C sharp minor section is magical. From this to pieces such as the Zwölf Ländler might seem a jolt but Chamayou is just as effective here, with an unselfconscious charm to his playing. If I marginally prefer Lewis in the third of the Drei Klavierstücke, it’s a matter of taste, not quality, for both pianists fully inhabit the other worldly quality of this extraordinary music.

Of the three Liszt song transcriptions here, ‘Auf dem Wasser’ is particularly winning, even if no one among modern-day pianists can quite match Volodos in conveying the heartbreak of ‘Der Müller und der Bach’. And the recital ends with a delightful rarity: a waltz that Schubert is supposed to have played at a friend’s wedding in 1826 but never wrote down; it was passed down orally and finally written down by Richard Strauss (you can detect his hand in some Rosenkavalier-like harmonies). As a modern-day fantasy on a theme of a Schubertiade, this disc is to be warmly applauded.