Whether Tchaikovsky’s Grande Sonate is a masterwork must remain a moot point, various critics describing it as ‘problematic’, ‘flawed’ and ‘middle-inspiration Tchaikovsky’. Douglas gives us a full-blooded reading con amore while adopting a less robust view of the first movement than Richter’s celebrated recording which, like Joseph Moog’s more recent account (Onyx, A/14), takes the moderato part of the prescribed moderato e risoluto to its fastest extreme. Douglas makes a powerful case for something in between these two and the more deliberate Cherkassky (live in 1982) and Viktoria Postnikova (Erato). The succeeding three movements are more in agreement with Richter than with Moog’s consistently brisker speeds. The latter has a further advantage in Onyx’s more immediate, focused sound engineering, superior to Richter’s and, for me, preferable to the less intimate placing of Douglas’s instrument in the acoustic of Cedars Hall at Wells Cathedral School. The toccata-like passagework of the finale in Moog’s hands is notably crisper and more articulated.

Douglas follows this with the brief (5'30") ‘Méditation’ from the late Dix-huit Morceaux, initially providing a soothing contrast to the bombastic sonata before reverting at its climax to more Tchaikovskian angst and despair.

In Rachmaninov’s Moments musicaux, absolute clarity of texture is of secondary consideration in the three fast numbers (Nos 2, 4 and 6). In these – and especially among the torrential demisemiquavers and triple/quadruple forte markings of the latter – Douglas throws caution to the wind, playing with an uninhibited, refulgent ecstasy that I found profoundly moving. At the centre of the set is the B minor Moment, which is moving for a different reason, as melancholic and brooding as anything Tchaikovsky wrote, and beautifully played.