Simon Trpčeski’s new Linn recording of masters of the variation is likely to inspire admiration and astonishment in equal measure. Far and away the longest of these sets is Brahms’s 1854 Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op 9, which he dedicated to Clara. Trpčeski’s interpretation of this delicate, tender music is the most personal playing I have heard from him. Deeply upholstered, certainly, yet at the same time clear, ardent and heartfelt. Perhaps it’s the progression of the affects Brahms presents over the course of these 16 variations that Trpčeski finds so congenial. It doesn’t matter. What does is that this atmospheric performance is played so convincingly.

Those variations for piano that have come down to us from Mozart often strike as the most playfully inventive of his works for the instrument. Their quasi-improvisational demeanour might be the perfect vehicle for Mozart’s imagination at its most capricious and wide-ranging. Yet rather than entering into the spirit of the music, which Trpčeski does with ease in the Brahms, in Mozart’s Paisiello Variations he seems to want to present us with a parody. The rigidly metrical, brittle sound he employs could almost stand as a metaphor for the ‘Dresden china doll’ approach of the ‘bad old days’ of Mozart interpretation. By the sixth variation, with its lilting semiquaver triplets in 3/4, it’s as if Trpčeski throws caution quite literally to the wind, so that the entire variation seems tantamount to holding a whirligig out of the window of a vehicle speeding down the motorway at 80 miles per hour.

With Beethoven’s C minor Variations we’re back on familiar ground – ground thoroughly cleared, that is, by many of the Soviet/Russian pianists of the past century. Thirty-two relatively brief variations on the trope ‘angry Beethoven’, to be condensed or expanded to whatever abstract proportions suit the player. Trpčeski’s performance here could well serve as the soundtrack of an Andrei Tarkovsky science fiction film.