I’ve rarely encountered such an ugly-sounding piano release. While the engineering admirably captures Ivo Pogorelich’s wide dynamic scope, his sonority ranges from hollow-sounding in soft passages to a strident and metallic patina elsewhere that proves fatiguing and difficult to endure. So does the pianist’s relentless time-stretching and rhetorical underlining throughout the first movement of Beethoven’s Op 78. The basic tempo heaves and billows, where Pogorelich’s Luftpausen and caesuras grow increasingly predictable to the point of cliché. The pianist controls the Allegro vivace’s rapid passagework superbly – his shading of the composer’s sudden shifts between major and minor, for example – but his elongation of the opening motif serves no expressive or structural purpose beyond caricature.

After subjecting Op 54’s graceful first movement main theme to pompous strutting (those unsubtle down-beat accents belabour the obvious), Pogorelich speeds up and bludgeons the poor triplets to a bloody pulp. It’s also hard to listen past the close-up and oppressive sound in order to appreciate Pogorelich’s occasional nods to the toccata-like second movement’s cross-rhythmic phrase groupings.

Although the rhapsodic style of Rachmaninov’s Second Sonata can usually absorb the caprices of subjective interpreters such as Horowitz or Weissenberg, Pogorelich’s habitual arhythmia and sectionalised approach to articulation and texture yield a fragmented and shapeless landscape, albeit one full of striking details and gestures.

There was a time when this pianist’s unorthodox notions conveyed remarkable musical insights bordering on revelation, such as in Brahms’s Intermezzos and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. However, on the basis of his first release in decades, he’s clearly assumed a new identity: ‘Ego Pogorelich’.