In the hands of a master, watercolour can be a most expressive medium, capturing the fragility of a scene or moment like no other. In the hands of a lesser executant, however, the result can be insipid or merely splodgy. Its use here, as the title of 19-year-old Yuanfan Yang’s diverse programme, derives from a set of three Aquarelles completed when he was just 16. If Yang’s name is familiar it may be from his success at the 2012 BBC Young Musician competition, at which he won the keyboard section. He is now a student at the Royal Academy and describes himself as pianist, composer and improviser.

A recital programme as wide-ranging as this, from Schubert to contemporary pieces, needs a persuasive personality if it’s not to sound bitty. Yang begins with the third of the Impromptus, D935, which is elegant without being particularly distinctive. From this we move to Chopin: the slow opening of the A minor Étude, Op 25 No 11, is lacking in menace, while in the maelstrom that follows Yang seems to prize beauty over character. The F minor Fantaisie is similarly fey: he writes in the booklet about the work’s ‘passionate and virtuosic character’ yet doesn’t really follow that through at the keyboard. Liszt’s ‘La campanella’ is again more about polish than personality, while ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ is too polite to plumb any real emotional depths.

From more recent times, Philip Cashian’s Landscape and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness (the latter dedicated to the composer’s memory) are both efficient but little more than that. Yang’s Debussy-inspired Aquarelles are given with conviction but that can’t save the disc, which I’d suggest
is primarily one for friends and family.