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This new coupling faces serious competition from my Jan ’14 ‘Album Choice’ Queyras/Harmonia Mundi – Dvorák fillers there, and with Pentatone the Pezzo Capriccioso and two other short Tchaikovsky transcriptions. One important difference, however, is that Moser plays the original Rococo Variations rather than the Fitzenhagen version which so angered the composer. Moser won a special prize at the 2002 Tchaikovsky Competition for his interpretation. He seems to repeat his success here and there’s much charm in the short pieces too.

The title implies a haunted existence – by whom or by what we cannot tell from the imploring nature of this collection of often lengthy jazz instrumentals, some murky and meandering (‘Abandoned Reminder’, ‘The Great Silence’) and others quirky and upbeat (‘New Glory’). Taborn and crew tentatively explore a musical netherworld, here and there casting light into the shadows – ‘Ancient’, for example, opens with an extended, almost inarticulate bass solo, before other instruments reluctantly enter the fray. The repeated, intensifying figures near the end of this piece do achieve an intellectual resolution, if not an emotional one, while the sweetly mournful ‘Jamaican Farewell’ has the listless ambience of a sailing venture undertaken on a nearly windless morning. ‘Phantom Ratio’ follows a similar trajectory, while ‘The Shining One’ provides a bumpier ride.

This is an intended celebration of the music of Clara Schumann – five pieces – and the Schumanns’ relationship with the young Brahms, represented here by his Op. 9 Variations (where Sasaki is quite outclassed by Barry Douglas on Chandos). So why is the young Japanese-American pianist’s debut recital entitled Obsidian? Because it includes a seven-part dramatic piece, Obsidian Liturgy, composed for her last year by Max Grafe – 2016 marking 140th/160th anniversaries of the Schumanns’ deaths. As a private gesture, fine, but 10.

The genesis of this release seems to hark back to 2004, when Neil Young remastered these tracks from his back-catalogue using the HDCD encoding he’d been favouring in the studio for almost a decade. Alongside it, there was also a 96kHz/24-bit release on DVD-Audio (remember DVD-A?), with Young hailing the format as ‘the difference between a true reflection of the music and a mere replica’. ‘I’ve always been a strong believer in analogue and this is about as close to the rewarding listening experience of vinyl as the real thing’, he added. Now the cynic night say ‘yes, but you also said that about Pono, Neil, and whatever happened to that?’.

Arguably better known for her classical operatic roles (though her farewell stage performance was in 2013), French soprano Natalie Dessay here chooses 11 jazz standards and well-worn – nearly all intimate – songs from musicals. A Deluxe Edition (limited territories only) has a second part where she acts as narrator for sparse musical equivalents composed by Graciane Finzi to eight paintings by Edward Hopper. That version ends with Barber’s Adagio and which, since WW2, has remained an emblematic piece for America. You don’t get, or need the words here, for Dessay’s American is completely idiomatic.

Guitarist Eric Johnson says of this album, ‘With EJ, I just decided to be more honest with myself and everybody, and show more of my personal side. ’ Which is all well and good, and the result has a certain homespun charm with a feeling of the artist sitting in his own studio, noodling his way through some standards and some self-written tunes, both solo guitar pieces and songs. However, anyone expecting much sign of Johnson’s past catalogue might be disappointed in this all-acoustic set, which is winsome at best: it opens with a cover of ‘Mrs Robinson’ and continues in a similar vein. Taking on board PM’s comments about the sources of the material here, it sounds respectable enough in a very detailed audiophile kind of way, but it’s all rather uninteresting, sounding like music for hi-fi show demonstrations rather than anything able to withstand repeated listening.