English pianist Stephen Hough has made an ingenious decision to pair Janáček's piano sonata 'From the Street' and his cycle of piano pieces ‘On an Overgrown Path’ with the Fourth and Fifth Sonatas of Alexander Scriabin. Janáček might have turned to Russia for a good book to read, but his music betrays no influence from that quarter. Scriabin was a maverick who never wrote the same phrase twice. And Hough is a chameleon pianist with an infinitely variable sound.

This ought to work, and it almost does. The Janáček interpretations are right as raindrops on a loft window in autumn and the Scriabin has about it a hint of the young Horowitz on the verge of breakdown. Each performance is wonderful in its own right, yet together they don’t quite gel.