Greatly celebrated in Chopin and in the Russian Romantics, Nikolai Lugansky here turns to Mozart where his musicianship and impeccable virtuoso technique face a more elusive and concentrated challenge. Significantly, he chooses one of Mozart's two minor key concertos and, after a less than ideally lucid or focused tutti from his partners, he enters with a true voice of calm; the reverse of, say, Martha Argerich's high-strung temperament where it seems as if the music's very nerve ends are exposed. Later, he eases his way into the second subject with an engaging freedom while at the same time reminding us that great Mozartians such as Brendel, Perahia and, most of all, Clara Haskil, achieve their insights with a finer poise and stylistic assurance.

In the Romance, too, the playing is hardly intense or distilled and even in the central downpour there is a touch of complacency, almost as if the music was proceeding on autopilot. Lugansky's inability to fuse a sense of freedom with an innate sense of propriety also means that his finale, where he plays with a light pattering détaché, seems more decorative than urgently committed.

In the sunnier clime of K459 the performance is once more, for all its suppleness and sheen, oddly remote, though it is true that many pianists would give their all to achieve what I can only describe as Lugansky's transcendental nimbleness in the finale's festive brilliance. The orchestra are no match for other high-flyers in this repertoire and the recordings dating from 1998 lack clarity and pin-point definition. The accompanying notes most oddly make no mention of Lugansky's triumph in the 1994 International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition.