Is there a more audacious way to commence your solo debut recording than by diving into Nikolai Kapustin’s wildly rhapsodic First Piano Sonata? Especially if you’ve got Yuki Negishi’s fast, well-oiled and supremely confident fingers. The totality of the sonata could be described as Oscar Peterson, Stephen Sondheim, Bill Evans and Astor Piazzolla collectively imbibing tequila spiked with LSD and steroids. Negishi plays the notes staggeringly well, yet the outer movements lack the foreground/background textural clarity, variety of articulation and sense of design that distinguish both the composer’s own and Steven Osborne’s (Hyperion, 8/00) recordings.

However, the musically conservative yet pianistically ingenuous title selection by noted educator, writer and pianist Melanie Spanswick receives an ideal premiere performance, and clearly suits Negishi’s strengths. By contrast, Robert Mitchell’s Our Hearts Dance the Infinite’s less defined tonality takes far less advantage of the piano’s (or pianist’s) potential, especially when heard in the context of Kapustin and Spanswick.

Or Chopin, for that matter. Here, Negishi’s square and often overly loud Berceuse can’t begin to compete alongside even the catalogue’s ‘B list’ versions, let alone Murray Perahia’s reference traversal (Sony, 12/85). Her Chopin ‘Funeral March’ Sonata features an impressively impetuous first movement, a slightly heavy and tepid Scherzo (microphone shyness in those notorious leaps?) and a more fluid and moderately paced Funeral March than we usually hear from young pianists who habitually drag out the music in the name of profundity. She begins the unison finale at a promising clip, only to quickly settle down into a measured lope, rather than evoking wind over the graveyard.

As for Bill Evans’s classic improvised masterpiece Peace Piece (why isn’t any transcriber credited here?), Negishi’s hammered-out and dynamically undifferentiated pianism totally misses the spirit and point of the original. Not that one needs to imitate Evans’s recording: Jean-Yves Thibaudet, for example, plays it slower and freer, yet he still creates a meaningful sound world (Decca, 6/97), as does Igor Levit in his sensitively inflected interpretation (Sony, 11/18). In short, Negishi has plenty of technique and energy but she needs a healthy dose of deep listening.