Trpceski, Petrenko and the RLPO here join forces for the eagerly awaited follow-up to their Avie recording of Rachmaninov’s Second and Third Piano Concertos (4/10). Expectations are fully realised in performances of the highest order. Listening to the earlier disc, it was clear that Trpceski was put on this earth to play this music and Petrenko to conduct it. The RLPO’s sound has been finely fashioned to Rachmaninov’s needs; it phrases with a breadth, warmth and sensibility that form an ideal counterpart to the piano’s solo role.

Rachmaninov himself spoke of the “youthful freshness” that he retained in the 1917 revision of the 1890‑91 First Concerto and that is precisely the quality that comes through here, coupled with Trp∂eski’s mature, judicious, thoroughly natural way of coaxing out the music’s melodic content, and his phenomenal command of the concerto’s bravura demands – demands that he meets with such a well-chosen kaleidoscope of colour and wondrous variety of touch. In the Fourth Concerto (here played in the customary “definitive” version of 1941) the aura of nostalgia and brooding is voiced with a rare understanding of the music’s light and shade and its ominous undercurrents. These are offset by firmly harnessed energy and expressive subtleties, which in the Paganini Rhapsody fuel a luminous performance of delicacy, sparkle and poignancy. This is a riveting disc, another major landmark for Trpceski and one on which Rachmaninov finds interpreters thoroughly attuned to his emotional world.