The thematic trajectory of Karim Said’s recital concerns the connection between composers and their disciples, with works by William Byrd and his pupils Thomas Tomkins, Thomas Morley and John Bull, Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil Anton Webern, and Schoenberg’s role model Johannes Brahms. Said intersperses Webern miniatures between Renaissance selections, while bracketing Schonberg’s Op 25 Suite with works by Bull and Tomkins, and then placing Brahms’s early Piano Sonata No 2 before a closing Byrd Fantasia. While the pianist recommends that you absorb his programme from start to finish in sequence, I can’t see why one cannot also listen to the individual performances out of context.

Before discussing Said’s music-making, I must get sonic gripes out of the way, in regard to the slightly hollow-sounding engineering and the way the pianist’s full-bodied tone turns glassy, monochrome and congested in loud moments. Otherwise, his masterly and creative interpretations hold great interest. In Morley’s Nancy, note Said’s alluring shifts in articulation and balance in repeated passages. He makes every note count in the posthumously published Webern pieces, where the ideal tempos help define the music’s elusive long lines. Bull’s Galliard features beautifully turned ornaments and carefully underlined emphasis of the composer’s unpredictable harmonic twists.

In the Schoenberg, Said adroitly differentiates the Praeludium’s close-lying counterpoint and makes a compelling case for his slower-than-usual tempo in the Intermezzo. Said’s genial shaping of the Menuett and Trio casts this music in a lilting light that differs from Maurizio Pollini’s etched bleakness or Glenn Gould’s dry-point humour.

From start to finish, Said not only displays a complete command of the Brahms Sonata’s myriad challenges but also reveals the extent to which he inhabits the music. He shares Sviatoslav Richter’s incisively effortless octave technique and knack for gradually meting out rubato in the manner of a seasoned conductor (the first movement’s development section, for example). The slow movement sings forth with shimmering transparency and lyrical restraint, evoking Arthur Rubinstein’s likening of Brahms’s keyboard idiom to ‘chamber music for solo piano’. While some may feel that Said’s Scherzo is a tad sedate for a real allegro, the tempo choice allows for clear and unambiguous execution of the smaller note values, as well as for the music’s dark undercurrents to register. Pianists will be humbled by Said’s remarkable legato control and pristine trills in the finale’s sostenuto opening, not to mention how he contours contrapuntal lines with prismatic purity and stunning poise. Similar ambidextrous aplomb informs the Byrd Fantasia that brings this fascinating programme to a close.