In the hands of a great pianist, of Richter, Cherkassky and Berezovsky (alas, not on record), the Sonata’s blazing, Schumann-inspired rhetoric and length can more than convince. But it is difficult to feel that Paley’s heavily inflected gestures will win new friends for an already much-maligned work. Where is the necessary impetus to drive forwards Tchaikovsky’s outsize rhetoric – his voltage and yearning intensity? How you wish Paley would leave well alone and allow the music its own voice instead of bearing down with such a contrived air of significance.

In The Seasons too you sense a pianist’s intention to give new meaning to music that has for him been too rarely allowed its full expressive range. But, again, even the most fragile utterance is underlined with the weightiest of red pencils, and the playing is leaden and distorted. There is a welcome burst of vivacity in August but in the final all-Russian ballroom scene the pulse is so unsteady that the dancers would surely fall flat.

There is no competition here for Pavel Kolesnikov’s recent Hyperion disc of The Seasons. Sound on this two-CD set is good rather than outstanding; but altogether you are left to recall the American poet Marianne Moore’s lines that ‘there is something beyond all this fiddle’.