Bach meets Brahms, with Busoni and Reger as enablers, and they all meet Feldman thanks to Igor Levit. The chorale prelude arrangements go together so obviously that they must have been coupled more often than I can remember (I recall Paul Jacobs on Nonesuch and at least one complete Busoni). But it’s certainly excellent to have them in such fluent, classy performances. Brahms’s Serious Songs without the voice feel strangely ersatz to me, but their place in the programme has an undeniable logic. And Feldman’s typically quietist, 29-minute (in this slower-than-usual performance) Palais de Mari, inspired by Syrian ruins housed in the Louvre, may well win admirers who come to it through an interest in the other composers and who know that Levit can be trusted to bring fierce concentration to any repertoire he advocates.

Levit has been on an extraordinary inner journey through Covid times (see Alex Ross’s extended essay about this in The New Yorker, May 18, 2020), offering more than 50 online ‘concerts’, seemingly all decided on the spur of the moment. In his own words, quoted in Sony’s thoughtful booklet essay: ‘To be able to make music without any outward constraint and spontaneously to choose works that deal with the basic questions of love and death, of loneliness and the possibility of truly loving one’s neighbour – all of this has brought a feeling of relaxation to my piano-playing that I had never known until now.’ Fine words. But I wish I could say that this relaxation translates fully on to this album. In fact I was surprised to find several of the chorale preludes a little uptight, never plumbing the kind of depths that, say, Brendel brought to Ich ruf zu dir (a treasured World Record Club LP, coupled with Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, which I’m not sure ever appeared on CD). Nor am I sure the recording quality does full justice to the subtlety of Levit’s tonal palette. All in all, then, a highly collectable disc, but not quite the epoch-making one the pianist’s stellar image has led us to expect.