The Latvian-born pianist Georgijs Osokins was one of six artists who, having failed to reach the finals of the 2015 Chopin Competition, received honourable mentions. Reading the biography accompanying this disc, one might think he had won first prize for, described by critics as ‘exceptional and unpredictable’, his performances ‘received either superlatives or led to controversy’. He is certainly the only pianist I have encountered who gives a booklet credit to his own bespoke piano bench.

Rachmaninov’s Chopin Variations, each one usefully given its own track, set off with a luminously voiced theme played rather too slowly and fussily for my taste, but the performance soon takes off with Osokins revelling in a work that is a vade mecum of Rachmaninov’s writing – nostalgia (Var 7), virtuosity (Var 9 might have come straight out of the Third Concerto) and heartbreaking lyricism (Var 17). The pianist, like Daniil Trifonov, omits Var 18 and decides to end the work by repeating the opening theme at an even more flaccid largo than that with which he began, rather than with the defiant presto coda or the quiet alternative offered by the composer. This addition is not in the score. Rachmaninov was quite capable of adding a Goldberg Variation bookend had he wanted to. Moreover, the booklet writer has no business describing Nikolai Lugansky’s choice of playing what Rachmaninov wrote as ‘going for crass and crash’. Doubtless, others will show more forbearance than me over these matters and, to be fair, these, the mildly distracting pedal noise and the pianist’s intakes of breath are the only factors that detract from a powerful and cleanly articulated reading.

The remaining items on the disc are eight short transcriptions that provide further evidence of Osokins’s stylistic identification with Rachmaninov’s idiom. They include the later of the two versions of ‘Mélodie’, Op 3 No 3, the Barcarolle, Op 10 No 3 as recorded (but not written) by Rachmaninov, and the Op posth Fragments. There is one track you should avoid and that is the unutterably vulgar traduction of ‘Vocalise’, culminating in a brutish and clattery cadenza unworthy of even the most ‘exceptional and unpredictable’ pianist, as his biography has it.