The 25-year-old Canadian pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko won the 2024 Leeds Competition, and as a memento of his victory, Warner has issued performances selected from the second and third rounds. On the whole, the interpretations are brightly lit and bold in spirit. True, Izik-Dzurko is capable of exquisitely languorous playing (listen to the gentle waves at the beginning of Ravel’s ‘Une barque sur l’océan’) and his timbral palette is wide. But he seems most comfortable when sharpening the edges of the music, giving focus to gestures that can readily smear in lesser hands.

Thus, in his tightly wound Chopin, he pays more attention to highlighting rhythmic conflicts and intensifying accents than to shading the melodies. And in the Ravel, he’s more intent on exposing the music’s clockwork mechanisms than on seducing us with its post-Lisztian sensuality. His fastidious ‘Oiseaux tristes’ seems directed at etching every individual feather but does little to convey the birds’ melancholy; his ‘Alborado del gracioso’ is similarly precise but rarely matches the atmosphere or wit of recent recordings by Michael Brown (First Hand) and Zlata Chochieva (Naïve, 6/23), not to mention Lipatti’s classic account (Warner, 9/57). As for the Ligeti, here, too, Izik-Dzurko electrifies us with his capacity for detail; but Danny Driver’s readings (Hyperion, 4/21) have more colour and, especially in ‘Automne à Varsovie’, more nuance of mood.

I wish that Warner had included Izik Dzurko’s Scriabin Fifth from the competition’s first round, a performance that revealed a rhythmic flexibility and a daring interpretative persona we don’t hear here. Even with its limitations, though, this short recital introduces a pianist of enormous promise.