Though the track list has it as Op 38, the Fifth Sonata should really be listed as Op 135, the number assigned by Prokofiev to the revised version of the work he made towards the end of his life and the version played here. Most of the changes are in the last movement, including a radically different final page to the original of 1925. Martynov invests its quasi-jazz second movement with a hushed, insinuating menace, very different from Katya Novitskaya (Melodiya, 1969), whose staccato left-hand chords are delivered with spiky aggression and little pedal.

Indeed, one gets the impression from this C major Sonata that Martynov is a Prokofiev-lite player, as confirmed by the Sixth Sonata, the last item on the disc. The tortured cries that open this great work and haunt its ending in Martynov’s hands are merely the statement of an interesting first subject, over-pedalled, with everything smoothed out (and missing the jaunty off-beats in bars 24 et seq). His characterisation suits far better the Sonata’s Allegretto movement (the return of its main theme is delightfully handled) and the third ‘waltz’ movement comes off well, though I think he must have small hands from the way he arpeggiates the left hand’s tenths. In the finale, Martynov shows us he is no slouch technically but here, as throughout the sonata, he is surpassed in every respect by Richter (live in Prague in 1965) who, despite the pretty dire sound, has you on the edge of your seat in the coruscating final pages.

Of far less musical significance but much greater interest discographically are the two works placed between the sonatas: the rarely recorded Pensées (1934) and Musique pour enfants (Douze pièces faciles) from 1935 (the same year as Peter and the Wolf). Martynov here does us valuable service in providing beautiful, considered accounts of these brief encounters with the softer side of the composer – and all in first-rate sound.