Anthony Romaniuk follows up his brilliant ‘Bells’ (11/20) with ‘Perpetuum’, another stimulating and imaginatively curated programme of short pieces and improvisations, going back and forth between various acoustic and electronic keyboards.

Starting at the concert grand, Romaniuk opens with a quicker, more rhythmically alive reading than most of John Adams’s China Gates, dovetailing into Satie’s Danses de travers, which sounds fabulous on a fortepiano. He turns to a Yamaha keyboard for his own arrangement of the Prelude from Bach’s E major Solo Violin Partita, which abounds in jazzy accentuations. This effortlessly slips into Romaniuk’s gorgeous piano treatment of the Penguin Café Orchestra’s Perpetuum mobile, followed by a relaxed and lilting reading of Ligeti’s ‘Fanfares’.

The fortepiano’s timbral distinctions between registers work to the Schubert G flat Impromptu’s advantage, especially via Romaniuk’s beautifully balanced and truly alla breve interpretation. Broken chords and repeated notes characterise a ravishing improvisation called Shadings. In Purcell’s A New Ground, Romaniuk’s steadily loping harpsichord bass lines contrast with the freely floating right-hand phrases. More Satie is next, this time on the Yamaha, while a quasi-Baroque virginals improvisation assiduously leads into a buoyant yet unpressured Stravinsky Piano Sonata first movement. Romaniuk’s straightforward Bach E minor Toccata on the harpsichord features impressively sophisticated finger legato work, while he lucidly voices the textures of Philip Glass’s Étude No 2.

I suspect that Romaniuk has a more impassioned Schumann Intermezzo in him than the meticulous yet slightly inhibited fortepiano rendition he presents here. Ditto his slightly square and held-back Prélude from Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin. I also wished the pianist would have let go more in the Beethoven Tempest Sonata finale, although he tears through the Shostakovich A minor Prelude with no inhibition. The penultimate Satie selection could have brought the programme to an attractively understated close. Instead, Romaniuk’s arrangement of Kapsberger’s Toccata arpeggiata evokes a lightweight 1980s synth-pop aesthetic that feels out of place. It’s the one miscalculation in an otherwise provocative and stimulating album.