Hyperion’s celebrated series devoted to the Romantic piano concerto has now reached Volume 87, and the decorative piano fireworks continue to tumble out from this label with no sign of stopping. One year ago, Simon Callaghan and Modestas Pitrėnas's Swiss orchestra gave us three of Carl Reinecke’s four concertos, and here is its missing partner from 1877, coupled with an earlier Konzertstück. As before, Callaghan’s playing lacks nothing in conviction and panache, and he grabs the ears from the very first bars.

Reinecke’s musical vocabulary usually doesn’t stray far from the language of Schumann and Brahms, though there’s something about the initial lyrical sweep of the 1853 Konzertstück that intriguingly suggests Rachmaninov 20 years before he was born. All of Reinecke’s industry and craftsmanship, however, cannot hide a drawback: this is pleasant but impersonal music that consistently bobs along just below the level where true memorability begins.

Matters change immediately with the second of Emil von Sauer’s two concertos (Stephen Hough dispatched the first for Hyperion in 1995). A star pianist of the late 19th century and beyond, Sauer threw everything except the kitchen sink into his eccentric and characterful creation, published in 1901. From moment to moment there’s Lisztian fire, French wit and whimsy, Brahmsian sobriety, nursery charm and flecks of Scottish colouring (his mother, the work’s dedicatee, had Scottish ancestry). Is the result structurally convincing? Not entirely. Does it entertain? Absolutely, especially when Callaghan and the orchestra join forces with such obvious enjoyment and glee. All in all, followers of Hyperion’s series should listen without hesitation.