I much enjoyed Petronel Malan’s previous discs of ‘transfigured’ Bach, Mozart and Beethoven (4/09) featuring a wide range of transcriptions, many of them obscure, most of them ingenious and effective. I am not quite as impressed with her latest collection, which features 13 arrangements of Tchaikovsky’s songs by Isaac Mikhnovsky (1914-78) and three by Samuil Feinberg (1890-1962). Partly it’s the lack of variety – a succession of encore-length morceaux with the original vocal line and harmonies more or less faithfully reproduced – and partly the fluctuating interest of the music. A certain sameness creeps in after 20 minutes and stays there.

Though Mikhnovsky – one of those sad cases of an international career denied by the Soviet authorities – ranges far and wide over Tchaikovsky’s vocal output, Malan, who presents his transcriptions in an order of her own devising, would have done better to cherry-pick the best of them and look further afield than the songs. Playing a Blüthner (bravo!) but often with too little pedal and exaggerated rubato, she tends to over-egg climaxes: witness ‘Reconciliation’, Op 25 No 1, and ‘None but the lonely heart’, Op 6 No 6. The sweet melancholy of the latter is better captured, in Wilibald Nagel’s more successful arrangement, by Shura Cherkassky in an unforgettable 1979 London recital (Decca). The Feinberg transcriptions of three songs from Op 54 show Malan at her best, played with the greater fluency and innate poetic refinement familiar from her earlier discs. This one is fine but it misses the range of the others as well as ignoring the many more resourceful Tchaikovsky arrangements by the likes of Pabst and Siloti that still await a recording.