Lars Vogt’s long fascination with the mysterious atmospheres of Leoš Janáček’s piano music, forever seemingly balanced on the dream-like cusp between fantasy and reality, produces a solid and crafted recital featuring three of the composer’s signature works.

In the ‘conversation’ with the pianist in the accompanying booklet, Vogt explains the appeal of the Czech master as a “feeling that something totally extraordinary was being expressed in a completely different way. The notation is sometimes absurd and verges on the unresolvable, but it arises, I believe, from a completely uninhibited, inner world of ideas”.

That sense of interiority is to the fore in the resigned melancholy of In the Mists, which reveals Janáček, taking his leave of substantial piano works, to be equally a creature of feelings. Like its companion works here, it ends with a vision of death, one reached via a journey marked by capricious rhythms, ostinato non sequiturs, often ambivalent tonalities and constantly shape-shifting melodies. All of which Vogt mediates with sensitivity and a clarity borne from playing of measured restraint, the fleeting burst of colour and light in the tentative but lyrical Molto Adagio all the more aching and...