Childhood memories are summoned, plus people and places…Indeed, there’s so much playfulness and charm here that the listener might well pant for some extra ballast from meatier things. It comes eventually from ‘Harmonies du soir’ and the F minor Etude from Liszt’s Transcendental Studies, both of them majestically, opulently despatched…But still lighter items dominate…A sweet album, this, superbly played and recorded.

It takes a personality of flair now to serve up a few bonbons in a recital and Stephen Hough is a master of the art…The skills needed to bring off a programme like this include sparkling virtuosity and the nonchalance to suggest it was all nothing really. Hough has both, like that magician of the
keyboard, Shura Cherkassky, in the previous generation.

A bran tub of bonbons, yes, but much more than that: it is also a portrait of an artist in love with music of all sorts (including, with no apology, the unfashionable and the second-rate if it happens to appeal to him), of a master transcriber and of that rare animal, a concert pianist who is not afraid to mix high jinks with high art...Witty, wistful, extrovert, introspective and cheeky by turn, this is a masterclass in a certain style of piano-playing, and a dream of an album.

A spellbinding nocturnal journey from Hough, which mixes his own arrangements and compositions with unabashedly sentimental miniatures by the likes of Eric Coates, Cécile Chaminade and Leon Minkus; just as you’re being lulled into a pleasant state of indulgent indolence, blistering accounts of two of Liszt’s Transcendental Études serve as a reminder that things do indeed go bump in the night.

His musical memories, right back to infancy, seem to float in the air, in one long delectation.

The glory of the album lies in its demonstration of Hough’s gifts as arranger, transcriber and composer. I would go a long way just to hear him play his two-minute arrangement of Blow the wind southerly, with its shimmering layers of colour and a deceptive simplicity. This is pianism of the highest order.