Having recorded what must equate to virtually the entire standard keyboard repertoire, Vladimir Ashkenazy follows his celebrated discs of Sibelius’s symphonies with a recital of the Finn’s piano music. And, while hardly diamond chippings from the master’s workshop, such an offbeat offering is of startling and absorbing interest. For Glenn Gould, who also recorded a selection of Sibelius’s piano music, “the style partook of that spare, bleak, motivically stingy counterpoint that nobody south of the Baltic ever seems to write” – an idiosyncratic statement that captures something of the pervasive oddity of these ultra-northern experimental offshoots from the composer’s genius.

For Ashkenazy this was clearly a labour of love. In the macabre Valse triste he subtly points one unsettling change of direction after another (as if to underline his love for this transcription he plays it twice, the second time on Sibelius’s own piano). The “Reverie” from Op 58 suggests a bitonal syncopation while the “Air variée” remembers Bach’s contrapuntal writing. There is a mock-Baroque polyphony in the Minuet from the same set, and if the flowers of Op 85 recall Sibelius’s modest wish “to provide his children with bread and butter”, there is much else in this fascinating programme to evoke an eerie play of northern lights across a frozen landscape. Many of these pieces would make excellent encores with which to bemuse an audience. Well recorded, they are, not surprisingly, given with total conviction and authority.