Given his stature as a philosopher/pianist and his public comments disparaging piano contests, it is easy to forget that András Schiff briefly trotted the competition boards when he was young. Indeed, the 20-year-old Schiff got positive notices in the 1974 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition, although he was ultimately placed fourth, yielding to first prize winner Andrei Gavrilov.

Before discussing the musical qualities of these archival recordings from the competition that feature Schiff, it must be said that the recorded sound is horribly strident and tinny in the solo selections’ loudest passages, as if the pianist were competing on a bar-room upright, although his nuanced soft playing comes across relatively unscathed.

Schiff obviously prepared the Rachmaninov E flat Étude-tableau and the Prokofiev Third Sonata to a proverbial T, but the interpretations seem acquired rather than instinctive, as is the arguably overthought Liszt ‘La leggierezza’. Conversely, Schiff completely ‘gets’ the sardonic spikiness of Shostakovich’s D flat Prelude and Fugue, balancing the latter’s rapidly spiralling lines brilliantly. Brahms’s Handel Variations reveal comparable attention to ornamental and polyphonic niceties and unified tempo relationships as in Schiff’s later commercial live recording. He brings similar care and forethought to the Tchaikovsky Variations. Written expressly for the competition, Alexander Pirumov’s Scherzo juxtaposes intriguing, widely spaced soft passages with unmemorable motoric padding: Schiff plays this generic academic piano music as if it were a deathless masterpiece.

The piano appears less clangorous in the Tchaikovsky and Brahms first concertos but the skewed balances make the Moscow Radio Orchestra sound even more under-rehearsed and tonally dicey than they are (to be fair, they find their centre in the finale of the Brahms). Unlike Schiff’s chamber-like underplaying of the Tchaikovsky’s outer movements in his commercial recording under Georg Solti, here he assumes the flashy virtuoso pose that he would soon eschew. Many of the Brahms concerto’s salient details foreshadow Schiff’s excellent and often underrated later traversal (also with Solti), such as the first movement’s earnestly projected cross-rhythms, the Adagio’s breadth and harmonic tension, plus the lightness and evenness of the finale’s passages in trills.

Ultimately my sonic caveats may dissuade general listeners from acquiring this release. Still, in light of Schiff’s latter-day acclaim as one of the Austro-German canon’s primary keepers of the flame, so to speak, it is fascinating to encounter his youthful counterpart live, unedited, under pressure and on the cusp of finding his pianistic voice.