This album completes Alexandre Kantorow’s recordings of Brahms’s piano sonatas, music of such youthful and heroic magnitude that it left both the Schumanns, Robert and Clara, in a state of awe and amazement. And it is very much this sense of wonder that permeates Kantorow’s performance of the C major Sonata, with its memory of the defiant opening gesture of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata and, to a lesser extent, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. Few pianists possess such storming rhetorical mastery, an innate sense of poetry and unwavering musical assurance. He revels in the glory of Brahms, and whether in outsize heroics, in the poetic intensity he brings to the Andante or in a heart-stopping finale, his performance is of a seemingly limitless range and scope. Following the Brahms Sonata with five Schubert-Liszt song transcriptions is a canny move. Never wholly an altruist, Liszt nonetheless wished to alert the musical world to neglected masterpieces, and if the union of a child of nature with a worldly sophisticate initially seems an uneasy combination, there is no doubting Liszt’s generosity and sincerity. Again, the ear-catching flourishes may be entirely Liszt rather than Schubert, yet reverence for the original is always maintained. Once again, the fullness of Kantorow’s response makes every bar of Liszt’s arrangements revelatory, whether in the gentle Frühlingsglaube, the disconsolate Der Müller und der Bach or the storms of Die Stadt. In Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy Kantorow’s playing again has a visceral impact, most notably in the final heaven-storming pages but also in the central Adagio, where his poise is contrasted with a rush of adrenalin as the music accelerates towards its climax. Entirely his own man, Kantorow nonetheless reminds you of the young Emil Gilels: the richness of his cantabile, the seamless legato. I can scarcely wait to hear him in the Brahms concertos.