Franz Schubert’s late piano music has a deceptive simplicity about it: a surface naivety masking emotional depths. The surface purity and the Romantic soul need to be kept in balance; with Schubert it is always a question of less is more. That is why the most thoughtful and self-effacing of the great pianists – Alfred Brendel, for example – make such fine Schubertians.

Geoffrey Saba, an Australian-born pianist resident in London, is one of this breed. He maintains the necessary equilibrium with skill and understanding. In the second Impromptu of D935, for instance, he transitions deftly between rippling semiquavers and the stately, somewhat melancholy chorale that closes the piece. In the following Impromptu, a theme and variations, he employs subtle rubato: enough to create a feeling of spontaneity that underlines the work’s title. Schubert could have called these four pieces a sonata, but he did not.

The first of the Klavierstücke belongs to the same troubled world as Winterreise, and contains the seeds of desperation beneath a restless surface. Both works include passages of major-key frenzy that collapse into the minor. Saba judges such moments unerringly.

I find the piano sound on this disc a trifle hollow. It lacks the warmth of Brendel’s Philips recordings (taped in 1975 and 1988). Clarity is also affected in tempestuous moments, such as the second of the Klavierstücke. Performance-wise Saba is excellent, although Brendel is more subtle, inward-looking and capricious.