Whatever command and authority that pianist Philip Edward Fisher brought to his excellent Naxos recording of Handel’s Keyboard Suites last year, he hits and misses in Russian music. Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition needs far more dynamic range than Fisher is willing to concede, while his casual observance of details and diffident sense of transition add up to interpretative vagueness and a rather bland whole.

The ferociously dispatched final measures of “Gnomus” would have been more effective had Fisher truly accelerated over the course of those preceding bass-register trills. “Il vecchio castello” is slow enough to be a sunken cathedral. “Bydlo” is not so relentlessly steady and concentrated as it ought to be.

Then there’s Fisher’s laboured repeated notes and enervated opening theme in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle”, so different from Yefim Bronfman’s decisive declamation and fluidity. Why does Fisher start the ostinato pattern of “The Market Place at Limoges” a shade under the tempo into which he settles? Here Bronfman’s suppleness and cumulative power prove superior, not to mention Ashkenazy, Berman, Rudy and Richter. The way to build and maintain momentum in the opening octaves of “Baba-Yaga” is to keep them steady and observe the accents and dynamic indications. In this regard Fisher’s little speed-ups serve no clear expressive purpose.

Fisher’s largely undifferentiated touch wears thin throughout Islamey, which lacks the lightness, contrast and diablerie typifying the work’s best long-playing era recordings (Katchen, Pletnev, Campanella, to name a few). He rounds off the Cui Nocturne’s edges and undersells the playful rhythmic snap of the Borodin Petite Suite’s two mazurka movements. However, he comes to life as he dispatches the rapid passagework in Borodin’s Scherzo and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scherzino with effortless, feathery élan and gorgeous dabs of tone colour. An uneven release, all told.