The Cuban-born American-based pianist Horacio Gutiérrez has enjoyed a successful international career for more than four decades, yet he’s made relatively few recordings compared with prominent contemporaries such as Murray Perahia, Garrick Ohlsson or Emanuel Ax. As this excellently engineered recital reveals, the 68-year-old Gutiérrez’s glittering technique and extrovert, tasteful style remain unambiguously intact throughout two Romantic-repertoire pillars.

The pianist must have been raring to go when he launched into Chopin’s Preludes: just sample the third prelude’s brisk, mega-secure left-hand runs, No 8’s grand sweep and smart textural layering, the deft changes in articulation in No 19’s difficult arpeggiated figures or No 12’s rhythmic vitality. You won’t find Moravec’s cameo-like refinement, Argerich’s angular intensity or the underrated Ashkenazy versions’ strong sense of line, but the wealth of nuance and details of colour informing Gutiérrez’s pianistically orientated conceptions bear increasingly satisfying scrutiny upon repeated hearings.

Similarly, one cannot fault Gutiérrez’s pianistic sheen in the Schumann Fantasie, although he doesn’t consistently plumb its harmonic riches, linear interrelationships and poetic stirrings. Take, for example, the pianist’s rather mechanical shaping of the wonderfully asymmetric unison writing at around 1'42" in the first movement, or his matter-of-fact romp through the skittish syncopations at 7'12". Few dispatch the second-movement coda’s notorious skips with Gutiérrez’s powerful grasp, but I miss the deft contrapuntal contouring distinguishing interpretations so disparate as those of Arrau, Kissin and Fiorentino (among my top-rated versions). And while his direct, uncluttered third movement is a corrective antidote to its indulgent antipodes, the softer passages lack, say, Kempff’s shimmering delicacy, while the climax points are full-bodied and solid, yet not so ardent and inevitable as in Horowitz’s great 1965 Carnegie Hall historic return. Still, the playing conveys stature and seasoned authority, as do Stephen Wigler’s booklet-notes.