Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations is faithful to the original and presents few radical changes. And so I can only assume that Tzimon Barto’s gothic inflation aims to recreate the spirit of Busoni’s opulence rather than his austerity. Certainly no pianist has sounded more determinedly ‘different’ since the once heady days of Ivo Pogorelich. True, today’s pianists often find themselves caught between Scylla and Charybdis, on the one hand accused of a cold academic literalism, on the other of an overly personalised interpretation. Yet nothing prepared me for Barto’s heavily romanticised view, where ideas of the most profound simplicity are underlined with the heaviest of red pencils.

Already in Var 1 he startles with his braying fortissimo and over-emphasis, while Var 2 replaces musical grace and nuance with much distorting rubato. Does Var 11 need such coaxing, and why such a sentimental view of Var 15? There is a brief glimpse in Var 26 of truer quality but, again, Var 25, Landowska’s ‘Black Pearl’ with its timeless expressive beauty, is ‘interpreted’ close to parody. After Glenn Gould’s mercurial genius (in either of his recordings) or Rosalyn Tureck’s magisterial account (where she is every inch the ‘High Priestess of Bach’), to say nothing of more recent and superb discs by András Schiff and Murray Perahia, Barto sounds audacious but false. For an encore he gives us a ponderous performance of the chorale prelude Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland. Capriccio’s sound is impressive but the performance harks back to a time when pianists used a composer as a springboard for personal excess.