Earl Wild’s piano transcriptions, direct descendants of those by Liszt, Busoni, Rachmaninov and Godowsky, are now in the repertoire of many pianists. In recent years, several recordings featuring them have appeared, Xiayin Wang (Chandos, 1/11), Martin Jones (Nimbus, A/17) and Benjamin Moser (AVI-Music, 12/19) among them. Anyone attempting them must inevitably face comparison with their creator, one of the most refined and musically sophisticated pianists of the past century.

An insouciant disregard for their technical difficulties must go hand in hand with a knowing twinkle (as transcriber) and a mischievous glee (in execution) to bring them off successfully. Vittorio Forte comes commendably close without in any way outshining Wild. In this particular acoustic, his richly voiced Bechstein favours the two Russians and Gershwin over Handel (Wild’s embellishments have always seemed pointless to me) or Marcello’s Adagio (Forte is hardly preferable to Wild’s consoling 2003 account or Edwin Fischer’s own arrangement, recorded back in 1931).

The seven Rachmaninov songs are superbly played. Forte is at one with the idioms of both composer and transcriber – not only the melancholy that pervades the music but also the ecstasy and exuberance that were also part of Rachmaninov’s make-up (try ‘Sorrow in Springtime’ and, especially, ‘Floods of Spring’, surely one of the most sustained outbursts of pianistic joie de vivre in the repertoire).

Does Forte quite match Wild’s tongue-in-cheek nonchalance in the Dance of the Swans? Not quite, but it is delightful nonetheless. In the Gershwin transcriptions he manages the delicate balance between the formal étude and the quasi-improvisatory feel of a jazz solo but cannot ever quite forget that he is a classical concert pianist, whereas Earl Wild in both his 1976 and 1989 benchmark recordings can convince you that he is Art Tatum and Bill Evans in disguise.

The last item here is a transcription, by Forte himself, of CPE Bach’s little Solfeggio in C minor (his most famous work), ironically as vapid and vulgar as the tone and content that frequently marred Wild’s overblown autobiography.