CD: Wagner: Piano Transcriptions, etc: Mikhail Rudy

Wagner's own music for piano - three pieces, including a one-movement Sonata for Mathilde Wesendonck's Album - takes second place here to Rudy's accounts of the transcriptions.

There are Liszt's versions of The Gods' Entrance into Valhalla from Das Rheingold and the Solemn March from Parsifal, as well as his wider-ranging paraphrase of the Tannhäuser Overture.

There are Hugo Wolf's paraphrases of the Walküre Magic Fire Music, and the Quintet from Die Meistersinger by the conductor Hans van Bülow; Rudy himself has contributed a version of Träume from the Wesendonck Lieder and his revision of a slightly wet transcription of Siegfried-Idyll.

It should be barnstorming stuff, but Rudy's playing, in which speeds sometimes seem unstable, never quite suggests the command and majesty that this extraordinary music demands.