Nick van Bloss is a perfectly decent pianist, whose own life story makes this achievement all the more striking: he has Tourette’s syndrome and ‘retired’ from musical life for 15 years, making a comeback in 2009. So his latest CD is a more than usually laudable achievement. Taken on its own merits, it shows that van Bloss is an artist who really likes to ‘interpret’, so you find that, for instance in the ‘Raindrop’ Prelude, he teases the melody to very personal effect. In the Third Sonata, his slow movement is arguably a little too slow to make the line readily sustainable, while the rhetorical moments are a little laboured. More worrying is a sense that the technical demands – and, of course, they are manifold – are taking him out of his comfort zone. In the opening movement, for instance, there’s a lack of an overall sense of shape, and there are all sorts of rubato that aren’t in the score. Certainly he doesn’t approach the supreme artistry of pianists such as Cortot, Argerich and Freire.

However, Daniil Trifonov certainly does. His Carnegie Hall debut, caught on the wing on February 5 this year, also includes Chopin’s Preludes – and with these we enter a different world. What makes this even more striking is that he was only 21 at the time. He came to international prominence when he won the 2011 Tchaikovsky Competition, and what’s impressive here is not just the magnificent and reactive pianism on show but also his maturity. His Chopin Preludes possess a stunning élan: magnificently ethereal in the F sharp minor, tenderly delicate in the C sharp minor; while the G sharp minor has a biting drive in Trifonov’s hands, which makes van Bloss sound dogged – which is unfortunate, because he isn’t. If Scriabin’s Second Sonata finds deeper pools of stillness in Sudbin’s hands, the second movement (Presto) is truly stunning and even gives Hamelin a run for his money in effervescent virtuosity, though what Trifonov doesn’t yet possess, perhaps, is Hamelin’s understanding of the emotional light and shade of this movement.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Trifonov is also a composer; he has a composerly grasp of the structure of all the works here. Nowhere does that pay greater dividends than in the Liszt Sonata, which is fever-pitched à la Argerich. At its finest, it’s simply stunning: the launch into the fugal Allegro energico has both delicacy and a swagger as Trifonov elucidates the contrapuntal writing with apparent ease. There are occasions, in the quieter, more rapt moments of this mighty work, where you want him to sit still mentally: it’s almost as if he’s already moving on to the next bar, the next phrase. That might of course be down to temperament, it could be youth, it could be the bigness of the occasion. Zimerman can dream more, which makes ultimately for a reading of greater depth. But this is a truly exciting debut, and the recording imbues it with both clarity and atmosphere.