We’ve had “the next Callas”, “the next Sutherland”, “the next Wunderlich”, now, we’re hearing 28-year-old Georgian pianist, Khatia Buniatishvili touted as “the next Argerich”. Not on the strength of this CD, featuring works each of which exists in an orchestral guise (and in which I’d much rather hear all of them)!

The Guardian critic unleashed as much bile on Buniatishvili’s Wigmore Hall performance of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as his feminist colleagues routinely do on signet ring-wearing, old Etonian Tory politicians who ride to hounds. Broadly, I’m forced to agree: the very opening of this recording is promisingly imaginative, with the Promenade played tentatively – as if the viewer is intimidated by art galleries (though The Promenade connective tissue convincingly becomes bolder as the performance progresses). The Old Castle is hypnotically, but interminably slow. This works, but Bydlo, the ox cart, sounds as though it’s lost a wheel. Other movements – like Baba Yaga (the Hut on Fowl’s Legs) – are dispatched in such a helter-skelter way that they become virtually meaningless. What should be a magical transition between Baba Yaga and the gravity and grandeur of The Great Gate of Kiev is completely botched and goes for nothing. The work just doesn’t make for a convincing whole. 

Even worse is Ravel’s La Valse: the sinuous rhythms and sinister glamour are completely absent. Ravel obviously intended it to be not only a mordant farewell to the waltz (where it becomes a dance of death) but to the entire Habsburg Zeitgeist that surrounded it and ended in a climactic cataclysm (Ravel succeeded in the depiction even more spectacularly than Mahler had a decade or two earlier). Buniatishvili plays the entire piece as if describing the Battle of the Somme. Similarly, the three pieces from Stravinsky’s Petrushka, which are thumped out with relentless brutality.