Listen to Josef Hofmann’s 1923 recording of Louis Brassin’s transcription of Wagner’s Magic Fire Music and you’ll hear one of the 20th century’s greatest pianists, at the top of his game, toss off a virtuoso finger-twister with such elegance that its difficulties seem to melt away. Listen to the same piece played by Chitose Okashiro (Pro Piano) and the music’s technical demands – as well as Okashiro’s blazing ability to navigate them – come to the fore. In the hands of Nikolai Lugansky, something entirely different happens. Suddenly, you’re off the concert stage and at the heart of the opera, and your attention to pianistic challenges is replaced with your immersion in the emotional and psychological challenges faced by Wotan as he abandons his daughter.

So it goes throughout the recital. Granted, Lugansky, like Hofmann and Okashiro, has a spectacular technique, and those seeking virtuoso thrills – those who revel in the pianist’s apparent ability to do the impossible – won’t be disappointed (listen to the way he summons the huge sonorities of Götterdämmerung, which sometimes seem to exploit the full keyboard at once). Nor will those looking for subtler examples of technical expertise. Lugansky is especially good at managing the tremolos and the other fillers used to enrich the sound. At no point do they choke the music.

But virtuosity is secondary here. Rather, Lugansky deploys his technical magic – in particular, his sense of colour, his phrasing and his ability to illuminate key details within the most cluttered textures – less to wow the audience than to capture the depth and ambiguity of the dramatic moment. Thus, for instance, Siegfried’s Funeral March is often mined for its heroism and noble ceremony; Lugansky’s performance also brings out, to a rare degree, its nostalgia and its reflection of Siegfried’s profound vulnerability. Likewise, his Parsifal sensitively captures the music’s combination of innocence and pain, honour and anger.

The arrangements are by a number of hands, and occasionally involve the interaction of multiple transcribers. It’s a testament to Lugansky’s skill that when he steps in for Brassin at the end of Entry of the Gods into Valhalla, the transition is seamless – and that his versions of the Götterdämmerung excerpts hold their own against the Wagner transcriptions penned by the 19th-century giants. The sound is excellent as well.