This is the final instalment of Howard Shelley’s well-received survey of the almost 200 solo piano pieces Mendelssohn somehow managed to scribble in his incredibly busy career—a number of which only reached publication after his death. These included the B flat Piano Sonata, composed at 18, exuberantly mixing influences of Beethoven and Weber with glimpses of the more gemütliche Mendelssohn to come, but missing the genius of his greatest teenage scores.

The last two collections of Songs without Words were also assembled posthumously, partly from pieces he had earmarked, partly by editorial choice, but show no falling off in variety and charm of the often underrated previous six books. The disc is rounded out with a variety of fugitive pieces, among which the Capriccio in E major, Op 118, comprises a serenely swinging introduction into which a wide-ranging, often stormy minor key Allegro suddenly erupts.

Recorded in a full, close acoustic—almost as though one were standing next to the piano in some Victorian drawing-room—the solidity of Shelley’s pianism and his belief in this music comes over convincingly. Except, to these ears, for one recurrent mannerism: a tendency, particularly in some of the Songs without Words, to insert tiny rubato spurts or slowings, which may heighten local expression but work against that longer-term sense of gliding ease that is so special to Mendelssohn’s musical character. For these pieces, the Dutch pianist Frank van der Laar on Brilliant Classics remains a favourite.