A set of fearsomely demanding concert études, a neo-Gothic exuberant Passacaglia, a Baroque-meets-Romantic suite and a Lisztian cycle of character pieces, topped off by a frenetic transcription of the Hungarian rondo from Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet, make up the final disc of Martin Roscoe’s survey of Dohnányi’s piano works.

For me the highlight is the Passacaglia, whose combination of complex counterpoint and a thrilling, apparently improvisatory style make it fully worthy of concert-hall rehabilitation, as Jeremy Nicholas also noted in his review of Daniel Röhm’s account (CPO, 9/16). Roscoe achieves more clarity than Röhm, and the Hyperion piano sound is more pleasing, but I can’t help wishing for a little more Sturm und Drang here, even a sense of danger, of the kind Dohnányi himself probably felt as he approached the end of the work at its London premiere, when he reportedly improvised the last few bars, having failed to complete the piece on time.

Roscoe makes no attempt to match the composer’s recorded tempos for the Six Concert Études, Op 28. The results are effortless and characterful if, again, a little low on risk. The last étude (Capriccio) has attracted the attention of some of great pianists, including Rachmaninov. Stephen Hough’s account is stupendously clear and efficient, at an exhilarating tempo (on his first ‘Piano Album’, now Erato), but it is only Horowitz at his most spellbindingly manic (Naxos Historical) who shows how caprice can truly manifest in music (he clocks in at 2'11", compared to Roscoe’s 2'48").

Composed around the same time as Debussy’s exploratory, Prokofiev’s iconoclastic and Bartók’s future-looking studies, Dohnányi’s set, as with so much of his output, looks to the past, mining techniques that had already been extensively probed by the great Romantic composer-pianists. His interest in the Baroque is most explicit in the Suite in the Olden Style. Roscoe brings a touch of grace à l’ancienne to the more lyrical movements while not holding back from suitably Romantic expressivity for the six Op 41 pieces, in particular the poignant final movement, ‘Cloches’. As always, he shines in the layering of Dohnányi’s expansive, quasi-orchestral textures, responding astutely to rhapsodic changes in moods and colours. In short, an eloquent conclusion to a reliable and revealing series.