Having expressed some serious reservations about Kissin’s past three RCA discs, while marvelling at his often prodigious command, I find it heartening to celebrate his new Brahms recording and a return to his finest form. Here, surely, is this young ‘klavier-tiger’ in all his quality. He opens the F minor Sonata with an imperious thrust that is pure Kissin and in the octave outburst at 4'46" he proves himself, once more, a fearless virtuoso; few pianists of any generation would even consider such a whirlwind tempo.

For some, his rubato, heated and intense, will seem overbearing and yet he finds the still centre at the heart of the Andante, that place where, in Sternau’s preface, ‘two loving hearts unite/in ecstasy bound together’. He thunders the final climax (molto appassionata) to the heavens and launches the Scherzo as though with a rush of blood to the head. Kissin may be a less subtle, less complex poet of the keyboard in this sonata than, say, Radu Lupu, but his searing projection carries its own rewards and it is no exaggeration to say that every bar of Brahms’s early and rhetorical masterpiece is marked by his overwhelming technique and magisterial temperament.

In Op 76 No 2 you would hardly mistake the pressure he exerts for Rubinstein’s or Perahia’s patrician grace, but it says a lot for his conviction that in No 7 from the same opus he can so audaciously replace the composer’s semplice direction with his own more elaborate notion of style. But it is in five of the Hungarian Dances that his extrovert nature finds its truest outlet, and in No 6 (a favourite Kissin encore) his performance is of an astounding verve and resilience. Here is virtuosity in the grandest of grand manners and RCA’s sound, for once, is as red-blooded as the playing.