His reputation as an exponent of period instruments well established, Tomasz Ritter follows his 2019 Chopin miscellany with this anthology composed for or inspired by the Viennese pianos of Conrad Graf.

Sporadic composer and practitioner on the glass harmonica, Franciszek Lessel remains more than just a historical footnote, his Fantasia in C (c1810) engaging through its amalgam of formal quirkiness with a melodic elegance inflected by traditional Polish music. Ritter accords it due insight, then is no less persuasive in Haydn’s Capriccio (1789) with its uproarious variations on an Austrian folk tune. If its title acknowledges a debt to Beethoven, Jan Václav Voříšek’s Sonata quasi una fantasia (1824) tempers its expressive brusqueness with a harmonic and modulatory freedom that augured well for a career curtailed by illness but whose stylistic immediacy is readily apparent here.

Its having a ‘WoO’ number might have prevented Beethoven’s Variations in C minor (1806) from enjoying comparable status to those ‘on an original theme’ in F and E flat, but it exudes the spontaneity of its composer’s fabled improvisations and Ritter dispatches it with suitable abandon. Three pieces by Chopin testify to the beneficial influence of Vienna’s pianos and its pianism around 1830: thus the Nocturne in C sharp minor, with its inward poise and subtlety of pulse, that in B flat minor, whose search for consolation finds only tentative assuagement, then the First Scherzo, whose more graphically enacted conflict intensifies towards its close.

It is here especially that this replica of an 1819 Graf, and Ritter’s handling of it, comes into greatest focus with an articulation of phrase and texture that galvanises such familiar music anew. Vividly recorded and extensively annotated, the attractions of this recital are manifold.