Sony took a bold plunge with Igor Levit’s first releases – Bach Partitas, Beethoven Late Sonatas and a Bach/Beethoven/Rzewski marathon – the monochrome portraits and large type evoking East Coast pretensions and the ghost of a certain Canadian artiste. Such obvious image manipulation put me on my guard, but the proof in the eating won me over. This latest release is equally ambitious if more user friendly, easily digested in one sitting or sampled in bites.

Levit conceived the program in response to the shock death of a close friend, however this is no conventional in memoriam but an intriguing meditation on the temporal and spiritual realms. Levit’s exemplar Busoni figures heavily and is...