Who said anticipation was better than realisation? In the Bach-Liszt, Polina Leschenko sets off at a blistering pace and leggiero, linking the end of the Prelude to the opening of the Fugue with the pedal, playing helter-skelter until the final bar, the last chord of which, in my score, is in A minor. Here it is wryly twisted into A major. Ah well. Strange, but at least it didn’t plod. That was before the Chaconne, probably the fastest ever recorded. One’s suspicion is confirmed: a phenomenal technique but one that robs the music of depth and dignity. Worse, it lapses into textual and musical incoherence.

To the showy Faust Waltz, Leschenko brings astonishing agility alternating with over-pedalled lyrical passages. This old warhorse needs careful handling, and if you are going to attempt to play the stretta at presto/prestissimo as marked, then you had better have the wherewithal to swallow it whole like Egon Petri or, better still, have something in reserve like Cziffra who offers a scintillating demonstration of articulation and controlled power at high speed. Approximation will not do. And certainly not in a great work like the Sonata, about which the least said the better. To ride roughshod over Liszt’s agogics and ignore important structural devices (at 6'26", for instance, when the left hand has the main subject in counterpoint) can be construed as careless, but when faced with a litany of quite perverse ideas and frequent rhythmic instability, then Miss Leschenko really should go back and think it through again.