There are many ways to make a debut disc stand out, as stand out it must. A prize-winner of a major competition has little cause to worry; but without that an artist needs to establish their credentials in other ways, such as the increasingly ubiquitous concept album. Canadian pianist Maxim Bernard takes the undoubtedly distinctive but potentially high-risk option of recreating Horowitz’s 1986 Moscow concert programme. Tagging a disc with the name of Horowitz increases its chances of coming up in internet searches. But it opens Bernard up to inevitable comparison.

By the time of his highly mediatised return to Russia after a 60-year absence, Horowitz was well beyond caring about being a barnstorming virtuoso. His programme (available on CD from DG and on DVD from Sony) was no more technically demanding than that of a conservatoire entry audition. But historically and culturally it was as highly charged as Stravinsky’s return in 1962. The real hero of the two Moscow events (the open rehearsal and the main concert), apart from the catering team who had to meet Horowitz’s demands for dover sole and asparagus, was the audience, witnessing the return of the prodigal son and the last firework sparkles of what had been denied to them for so long. Its reactions – the quiet tears to Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’, the screaming before the echoes of the last note of a Rachmaninov Prelude had died away – were as much a part of the events as Horowitz’s spellbinding performances themselves, which were by turns witty, nonchalant and dangerously exciting. Such magic can never be recreated.

Bernard is a tasteful and refined pianist, with sensitivity and musicality, capable of pleasant sounds and elegant turns of phrase. But despite his claim to be giving ‘a second wind’ to the programme and ‘presenting it from a new angle, in the light of my own personality’, he is evidently under the Horowitz spell and therefore in the shadow of it. I struggle to find any strongly individual voice, except perhaps for odd episodes such as the skittish third variation of the Schubert Impromptu and to a certain extent in the Scarlatti sonatas – though he is still no match for the shy intimacy of the master in these. There are some perfectly valid attempts at recreating Horowitzian grandstanding in the Chopin Polonaise and his Chico-Marxian playfulness in Moszkowski’s Étincelles.

What Bernard has to offer as an artist will only properly emerge when he gives us a programme entirely of his own choosing. For the present disc, rather as film critics have pointed out in welcoming Spielberg’s recent version of West Side Story, it is hard to see a compelling reason for remaking a masterpiece.