Russian and Soviet music and culture run like a river through Peter Donohoe’s distinguished career. His joint silver medal at the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition cemented a relationship with the country, its musicians and its public that is ongoing.

My instant reaction on pushing ‘play’ and hearing the first bars was ‘Ah – this is going to be good’. And so it proves, perhaps the most consistently enjoyable and satisfying recording of Tchaikovsky piano solos of recent years. (Signum is a little shy about the timings of the two discs. Don’t be misled: the total length is 84'56" – basically the length of a normal CD that has, drat it, overrun by five minutes. Personally, I’d have cut the Capriccio and got it all on to one disc.) There’s a lightness of touch, a crisp transparency and clarity of texture that sends the opening ‘Scherzo à la russe’ spinning off into the realms of sheer delight, leaving you to wonder, as does Donohoe in a brief booklet aside, why Tchaikovsky’s piano music should remain so infrequently performed in concert programmes, ‘containing as it does all of the composer’s characteristic harmony [and] wonderful melodic gift’.

Six Pieces on a Single Theme (from 1873) is a case in point, a work that illustrates both Tchaikovsky’s limitless imagination and fecundity (incidentally, for those who collect such musical references, No 4, ‘Funeral March’, quotes the Dies irae). Donohoe enterprisingly includes Aveu passionné, an Op posth using material from the abandoned ballet score of Voyevoda, but it is the Grande Sonata No 2 that is the central feature of this varied programme. I have to say that Donohoe’s performance belies its reputation as a problem piece. It can sound relentless and contrived in some hands. Not here, though I wonder if the opening salvo is a little too jaunty to be truly risoluto. No matter. Donohoe’s convincing conception of the work is one of heroic grandeur without rodomontade.

After that comes the popular ‘Humoresque’ (I confess I did not know that the middle section is based on a French folk song that Tchaikovsky heard in Nice) and finally the Dumka in, if not the most compelling recording since Horowitz, then certainly the best-recorded (Snape Maltings; Nick Parker and Mike Hatch). And Donohoe, like Horowitz, makes the not unreasonable decision to play the final C minor chords pp instead of the written ff. A very fine issue indeed.