When Kate Liu took the Bronze Medal at the 2015 Warsaw Chopin Competition, it was not a sign of general agreement that she was ‘pretty good’ but a middle ground between the judges who thought her exceptional and those who found her disappointing. That same controversy will probably greet this sensationally individualistic release as well. You may be enthralled by these performances (as I am) or you may dislike them, but you’re unlikely to be lukewarm.

In the Brahms, Arthur Rubinstein’s 1949 version stands as a good point of comparison (RCA). With his bright textures and impetuous tempos, Rubinstein stresses the sonata’s youthful ardour; it may be in F minor but that doesn’t block out the sunlight. Liu is his polar opposite. With her deliberation and emotional depth (subtly amplified in spots by her powerful left hand) – and with her reflection and her poignant intimacy (check out her secretive exploration of the second movement) – her reading seems streaked with harbingers of the melancholy marking so many of Brahms’s late masterpieces.

To call Liu’s interpretation slow would barely hint at its breadth – it’s so drawn out (46 minutes for a work that rarely reaches 40) that many listeners will find their patience depleted. If you’re more sympathetic to Liu’s premise, though, you may find that she draws you overpoweringly into her world with her daring yet finely proportioned elasticity of tempo, her often extreme treatment of dynamics (the fff climax of the second movement seems uncommonly shattering, given the delicacy elsewhere), and her artful colouring. Add to this the gravitational pull with which she invests the points of arrival, and the music never seems to drag.

Her Beethoven has the same qualities – the same thoughtful consideration, the same flexibility, the same sense of shape (the last movement builds as well as any). In International Piano (September 2022), Jed Distler called her performance at the Cliburn Competition, a few months after this recording, ‘rapt’ and ‘heartfelt’ – and those words seem right on target.

Throughout, Liu’s fingerwork is unfailing (in the Presto of Brahms’s finale, she makes Llŷr Williams’s recent account seem approximate – Signum, 12/24); and her balances are breathtaking, especially in passages featuring superimposed rhythms. The engineering is first-rate, too. Overall, a major appearance by a pianist who has remained too deeply in the shadows.