Francesco Piemontesi, who numbers Brendel, Perahia, Weissenberg and Ousset among his teachers, offers a masterly account of Debussy’s Préludes. Yet this is both a virtue and a limitation. His ultra-modern reaction to an earlier tradition exemplified by Gieseking replaces half-lights and tonal opalescence – and it has to be said approximation – with an unfaltering and imperious command. He has, in this sense, imbibed much of Ousset’s force and clarity, if also her literalism. Bold and dramatic, he excels in the more extrovert preludes (‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’Ouest’, which is truly tumultueux, and ‘Feux d’artifice’, all soaring rockets and Bengal lights).

But there is too little mystery and confidentiality in those preludes where Debussy demands stillness rather than hyperactivity, a touch of mystery and enigma rather than exultance. The opening of ‘Voiles’ is more assertive than piano and très doux, hardly evoking the ever-fanciful Cortot’s ‘flight of the white wing on the crooning sea’. ‘Puck’ has put on weight since we last met him, and why so fast (it is marked modérée) in the near-bitonal mists of ‘Brouillards’? Again, ‘Bruyères’ is fast and casual, with too little sense of heathland and the smell of heather. There is greater gentleness in ‘La fille au cheveux de lin’, some measure of desolation in ‘Des pas sur la neige’, and ‘Minstrels’ is a dazzling success, truly nerveux et avec humour. But, more generally, you are made more aware of the virtuoso than the poet.

Per contra, Marita Viitasalo, who gives us the second book of Préludes (she recorded the first for Ondine almost 30 years ago), is more restrained, less inclined to inflate delicacy and reflection into concert-study proportions. But her caution in the whirling abstraction of ‘Les tierces alternées’ exposes technical limitations and her lethargy in those Préludes calling for fleetness (‘Puck’ and ‘Ondine’) erases much sense of character. ‘Hommage à S Pickwick Esq’ – an affectionate dig at British pomposity – is insufficiently deft or robust, and Viitasalo’s coupling of the Suite bergamasque is hardly more successful, with too little vivacity (try the Menuet) and quickness of response.

Piemontesi, whose disc is dedicated to Ousset, is opulently recorded, a faithful mirror of his magisterial approach. His is very much a personal taste, offering too little competition for Gieseking (EMI), who still exerts his old magic, for Zimerman and, in Book 2, for Marc André Hamelin.