The chief interest here lies in a coupling which pairs a conventional offering with one which blazes a new poetic path. Carl Loewe’s Second Piano Concerto has been described as ‘over-loaded with passagework’; alas, his constant elaboration, unlike Chopin’s, too often impedes rather than advances his argument. The second movement, entitled ‘Espaniola’, promises something special but peters out into cliché, and although the virtuoso temperature rises in the finale (try the photo finish) one is left wishing that the streams of notes were supported by less banal ideas.

Chopin’s F minor Concerto, on the contrary, is the reverse of predictable, making the sleeve- note writer’s claim that this record presents ‘more than an hour of highly polished jewels displayed upon a luxurious silken orchestral carpet’ oddly offensive. Nonetheless, Mari Kodama, who numbers Brendel and Tatiana Nikolaeva among her teachers, is an impressive soloist happy to note-spin with all the required ease and facility in the Loewe and to provide a good deal more in the Chopin. Competition is tough from the likes of Pires and Perahia, let alone Argerich (the recent EMI rather than DG) or the ever-ardent Mewton-Wood, yet her playing is never less than thoughtful and with more than a hint of the turbulence close to the surface of Chopin’s early glitter and exuberance. She is well-partnered and recorded, though the sleeve note tells us little about Loewe; notably that in 1864 he entered a six-week trance, a similar event causing his death in 1869.