A first listen to 25 year old Lukas Geniušas’s performance of Rachmaninov’s 24 Preludes left me enormously impressed. A second and indeed third hearing prompts, once more, enthusiasm for his shot-from-guns virtuosity, his leaping into the fray like one possessed. Yet it is when you consider Rachmaninov’s infinite variety that a few, I hope not churlish, reservations arise. These are very much ‘live’ readings, given at the Moscow Conservatory, and while I am the first to celebrate such occasions – their extra edge and audacity – there were times when I wondered whether Geniušas would have curbed or modified his sometimes excessive impetuosity under studio conditions.

So, while you are left to wonder at his blaze of youthful power and aplomb in the inchoate whirl of Op 32 No 6 in F minor or in No 3 from the same set, where Rachmaninov breaks out into one of his rare moments of light and festivity, you miss the greater maturity elsewhere of artists such as Ashkenazy, Howard Shelley and, most of all, Moura Lympany (for the American critic Richard Dyer, ‘a virtuoso of dreaming’), who, in the second of her three recordings on both Testament and Decca, plays with a classic poise that illuminates rather than takes away from the composer’s high-octane rhetoric and fervour. Happier in forte and fortissimo than in pianissimo and piano, Geniušas is also hardly Largo in Op 23 No 1, is relentless in the magical trellis of No 9 and is disappointingly open-ended in the great B minor Prelude from Op 32 (no comparison, cruel though it may be, with Moiseiwitsch’s legendary recording).

More generally, heard as part of Geniušas’s audience, many of these performances would carry you all the way. In more relaxed, less electric circumstances, some misgivings occur. At his best in the Prelude (Op 3 No 2), fired to fame by American publishers as ‘The Moscow Waltz’, and in the turbulent advance to the climaxes of Op 32 Nos 4 and 5, you can only marvel at Geniušas’s early achievement while looking forward to hearing him in a less fraught setting. Recorded sound is good, though there is little space between the preludes as Geniušas rushes us from one to the next.