‘Splinters’ couldn’t be more appropriate a name for pianist Mariann Marczi’s collection of Hungarian piano pieces that are generally thorny, brief and sometimes aphoristic in nature, such as the four-movement suite by Kurtág that opens the disc. This leads into ‘Fém’ from Ligeti’s second book of Etudes, where Marczi’s crisp, hard-hitting interpretation differs from Aimard’s faster, suaver dispatch (Sony, 1/97). She builds Kodály’s Méditation from the sustained bass-line upwards, and makes as compelling a case as any for the same composer’s Seven Pieces; listen to her marvellous differentiation between the steady staccato left hand and the edgy legato right-hand line. The 10th piece of László Lajtha’s Contes, Op 2, receives a slightly drier and more incisive reading compared alongside Klára Körmendi’s more expansive and sensuous traversal (Marco Polo, 4/93 – Marczi plays the opening measure considerably faster, for example).

Marczi brings such feathery lightness and rhythmic sparkle to Bartók’s Three Burlesques that it’s easy to forget her idiomatic phrasing and accentuation of the folk-based melodies. Of the two Zoltán Jeney works, I prefer the painfully sparse Arthur Rimbaud in the Desert (if you respond to John Cage’s late ‘number’ pieces, you’ll probably like this) over the grey, austere and frankly dull Ricercare. Although the disc’s final and longest piece, Gyula Csapó’s The Ultimate Goal, was written by a Morton Feldman pupil, I hear more of the austere, bare-bones discontinuity that often marks Christian Wolff’s piano music. The slightly distant, opaque sound suits both the music’s dynamic extremes and the detailed integrity of Marczi’s interpretations.