Warner's are just about giving away lots of discs in HMV Oxford Street at the moment, and one of the more interesting of these gifts (actually it cost £1.99) has been an Apex CD by pianist Til Fellner, playing Schumann's Kreisleriana, and Julius Reubke's Piano Sonata. Stupid cover graphics (like all of this series except the ones with Yehudi Menuhin on the front), but perfectly decent playing, so far as I'm any judge.

I love music for organ plus orchestra – Handel Organ Concertos, Poulenc Organ Concerto, Saint Saens 3rd Symphony, you name it. But I have an aversion to solo organ music, perhaps because it is for ever connected in my mind with compulsory school chapel, a form of compulsion I seem to recall resenting above all others. (Eventually I took to skipping it. The Real Rule under the Official Rule seemed to be that if I didn't boast about this, which I didn't, they wouldn't make a fuss either. They, or some of they, must have known.) Accordingly, the only thing I knew about Reubke until now was that he had perpetrated solo organ music. So to hell with him.

But now with this Piano Sonata disc, at a mere £2, I am willing to give him a go. It's on the CD machine now. Snap verdict: it sounds very like the Liszt Piano Sonata. This is not surprising, since Reubke was one of Liszt's most favourite pupils, apparently. But even given that fact, the resemblance is extreme. So, if you like Liszt piano music, this is highly recommendable. I quite like it. But this is the kind of music, I think, that responds to great playing, of the sort that causes people to say "the playing was better than the music". Fellner is good. I would like to hear someone like Richter, Gilels or Lazar Berman doing it. I'd like to hear someone playing it to the gallery, instead of tastefully.

Reubke died in a hotel room at the age of 24, according the sleeve notes of this CD, but it doesn't say how or why. Nor could I learn this from any other source. Was he a huge loss? Maybe. We'll never know.