Highlights from the 2005 Husum Festival of Piano Rarities include, as ever, many fascinating obscurities but also, unusually, several clinkers. It would be difficult not to warm to Ekaterina Derzhavina's Medtner with its sighing phrases and melting tone, or to Ludmil Angelov's exhilarating account of the stormy Prelude, the first of Three Pieces, Op 15, by the Bulgarian composer Pantcho Vladigerov (1899-1978), a real tour de force. Others will take more kindly than me to the central movement of Enescu's Third Piano Sonata, even in the sensitive hands of Konstantin Lifschitz.

The most extended work and substantial discovery on the disc is the first piece from the triptych Ombres by Florent Schmitt (1870-1958). It is a 15-minute tone-poem of enormous difficulty whose tonal language veers between late Scriabin, Debussy and, as Martin Anderson observes in his booklet, “the hot-house languor of Sorabji”. Strange, then, that after this impressive display, Cecile Licad gives a really awful performance of Bamboula, insensitive to Gottschalk's dynamics, spirit and score - it seems to be a version of Licad's own devising. This is followed, unfortunately, by some flat-footed Mozart-playing in one of the composer's least interesting sets of variations, matched only by the monochrome Michael Endres in a sequence of lacklustre Schubert dances.

But a hotchpotch of music ranging in merit from first- to third-class and played by eight different pianists is bound to prove uneven. The value of the Husum Festival and Danacord's recorded highlights is incontestable. Where else could we hear such music? What other label would commit annually to issuing such a programme without the benefit of any editing or patching?