I first heard Alessio Bax as a jury member at the 1997 Hamamatsu International Piano Competition in Japan, where he won first prize with performances of a youthful bravura and, in one special instance (Granados’s El amor y muerte), of a rare idiomatic command. Today, this young Italian-born, American-based pianist confirms his status (having triumphed at Ferroll in Spain and Leeds as well as Hamamatsu) with a début recital of a special quality and enterprise.

Here, the Baroque style is seen through richly varied perspectives, ranging from the audacious to the devotional, from the intimate to the heaven-storming. Bax launches the Bach-Busoni Toccata and Fugue with a superbly crisp and articulate call to attention. Favouring brilliance over effulgence he keeps everything clinically clean and his playing in the Adagio from Bach’s D minor Concerto is memorably acute and fastidious. His way with the Bach-Siloti Prelude (the work with which Gilels used to end his recitals; a romantically troubled benediction) is brightly lit but lovingly etched, and his Handel-Liszt is of an unfaltering virtuosity and poetic inwardness. Bax’s Bach-Rachmaninov and Corelli Variations, too, are of the most concentrated wit and individuality – Variation 9 is introspective indeed, and in the insinuating waltz of Variation 15 and the desolating coda (where emotion is recollected in pain rather than tranquillity) his playing quivers with an almost hypnotic intensity. Sound and instrument are ultra-bright.