After a brilliant and refined recording success in Albéniz’s Iberia, Kotaro Fukuma moves to a more wintry clime. In his accompanying essay he writes touchingly of his time in Russia, where he imbibed sights, sounds and traditions that led inevitably to the present recording of Mussorgsky, Glinka-Balakirev, Balakirev, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky-Agosti. An international prize-winner (though he confesses he is glad that the competition arena is behind him), Fukuma again plays with unfailing expertise. He is hardly the sort of pianist to set jury members with fixed notions of interpretation at each other’s throats; and if he occasionally steers a middle course, many will be grateful for his way of allowing his listeners their own space.

Fukuma’s Mussorgsky is more musicianly than forced or inflated, and he is notably successful in the eerie world of ‘Catacombae’ and in the flickering half-lights of ‘Con mortuis in lingua mortua’. There is delicacy and precision in the very different, floridly pianistic world of Glinka-Balakirev and a coolly phrased manner in Islamey (for Liszt, ‘an agreeable Oriental rattle’, once known as the most difficult piece ever written for the piano). Tchaikovsky’s Dumka is both elegant and commanding, while the Stravinsky-Agosti Firebird is thrown off with an enviable brilliance and finesse. The recording lacks the fullest range but does little to lessen the impact of so much impressive piano-playing.