With Stephen Hough's Mendelssohn we enter a new dimension. The soft, stylish arpeggios that open the first work here, the Capriccio brillant, announce something special. But this is just a preparation for the First Concerto. Here again, 'stylish' is the word. One can sense the background – especially the operatic background against which these works were composed. The first solo doesn't simply storm away, fortissimo; one hears distinct emotional traits: the imperious, thundering octaves, the agitated semiquavers, the pleading appoggiaturas.

Volume 23 in the Hyperion Liszt series validates Liszt's phenomenal mastery of transcribing, and in the case of Berlioz's "Harold in Italy," translating an orchestral work with viola obbligato into a magnificent chamber work for piano and viola. The excellent content of Berlioz's work alone can easily earn five stars, but the other three substantial transcriptions of Gounod and Meyerbeer enhance the splendor of this recording even further.

Some impressive pianism may be found here, both from Piers Lane and prior to that from Eugen d’Albert. The latter was a virtuoso pianist and transcriber, also a composer whose opera Tiefland (1903) has remained popular in Germany. He was, however, born in Glasgow of French and English parents and began his career in England. Eventually he publicly renounced all things Anglo-Saxon, much to the annoyance of his mentor, Sir Arthur Sullivan, and settled in Berlin to concertize, performing the great masters: Bach, interwoven with Spohr and Beethoven.

In 1931 the pianist and muse Harriet Cohen invited all her principal composer friends each to make an arrangement of a work by J S Bach for inclusion in an album to be published by Oxford University Press. Published as A Bach Book for Harriet Cohen, it is recorded here for the first time by virtuoso pianist Jonathan Plowright. The disc is completed by eight other 20th century British Bach transcriptions.

Canada's Angela Hewitt would be on anybody's list of the world's great pianists, but she has been known as a Bach specialist. Her cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas on Hyperion has, to an extent, been what you might expect: technically precise, individualistic, a bit idiosyncratic. What listeners may not have been prepared for is how high the highs are. Here it is absolutely essential to stick around through the whole program. Hewitt's Piano Sonata No. 17 in D minor, Op. 31, No. 2 ("Tempest"), has odd features: violent accents in the outer movements, and a curious de-emphasis of the octave ornament figure that plays such an important structural role in the slow movement.

Among the most adaptive and flexible – some might say eclectic and facile – of composers, Darius Milhaud was well-equipped to provide stage and ballet music that could set any scene and change moods at a moment's notice. His vivid scores, however, are most often heard today in concert, and without scenarios in hand, some imagination is required to understand how effective these works may have been for the stage. Taken at face value, Le carnaval d'Aix seems like an episodic piano concerto, L'apothéose de Molière a mediocre neo-Baroque pastiche, and Le carnaval de Londres a modern music hall rehash of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera.

The case for performing Mozart's horn music authentically on its original natural (valveless) horn is a bit tougher than for music in other genres; it's hard to imagine that Mozart or his audiences wouldn't have preferred the smooth scale of the modern horn to the reedy, clarinet-like tone that emerges on chromatic notes even on a fine recording like this one. Yet the four concertos, two of them incomplete or incompletely transmitted, and the Horn Quintet in E flat major, K. 407, have been recorded often enough on natural horns.

The music of Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi took a dive in concert program frequency after his death in the U.S. in 1960, when the fashion was for Bartók or still more progressive composers. It has been making a comeback, however, and this satisfying release by Britain's venerable Nash Ensemble, largely specialists in contemporary music, should only help it along. Dohnányi was classified as a conservative, and indeed there is a strong Brahmsian streak in his music.