Here’s a fine, intelligently programmed, eloquently played debut on disc with an intriguing premise by the young Australian pianist, Rob Hao. Taking Schubert’s F-sharp minor Piano Sonata as his starting point, Hao glosses the unfinished fragment with his own notional completion before overlaying both with Chopin Nocturnes, a Schubert Impromptu and song (the latter transcribed by Liszt), Etudes by Alison Kay and three English Country-Tunes by Michael Finnissy.

The result is a well-argued and articulated sleight of hand implied by the album’s title with old and new entering into an ever-changing dialogue with each other. That intriguing notion of composers offering both commentary on and continuation of work by their predecessors is well mapped in Hao’s elegant trajectory from Schubert’s lyrical harmonic fluency through to Finnissy’s intensely virtuosic interrogation of his own English folk heritage.

Hao negotiates the multiple overlapping paths with aplomb, stitching in along the way his own Palimpsest 571, a nod to the catalogue number of Schubert’s early...