Yevgeny Sudbin’s ultra-demanding recital is lovingly chosen to suggest a wealth of subtle inter-relationships. And, in an age of much standardised playing, his performances are vividly personal both in technique and in character. Others may aim for a more expansive eloquence in Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets but few have carried the richly ornamented vocal lines forwards with a more breathless ardour and momentum, a true memory of Petrarch’s volatility in love (‘I fear, yet hope, I burn, yet am turned to ice’). And, staying with Liszt, what a generously shaded and inflected way with the F minor Transcendental Etude. Where others offer little beyond storm and rant, Sudbin seeks out a rich vein of poetry as well as ending with dazzling facility. What emotional fervour and fullness in ‘Harmonies du soir’, what individual commitment in ‘Funérailles’, the central octave uproar (where Liszt remembers ‘the hoofbeats of the Polish cavalry’ in Chopin’s A flat Polonaise) brilliantly true to both the letter and spirit of the score.

Then there is Ravel’s Gaspard in a performance of rare imaginative resource, chilling and seductive in the enticement and glittering cascades of ‘Ondine’, disconsolate and evocative in the macabre chiming of ‘Le gibet’ and with a wild capering, skittering malevolence in ‘Scarbo’. Here, everything – particularly left-hand detail – is brilliantly lit, never brushed over in a vague blur or approximation (Gieseking). Finally there is Sudbin’s own arrangement via Liszt and Horowitz of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, another tour de force conjuring once more a young pianist released from all inhibition, going his own way with dazzling imaginative resource. Sudbin’s accompanying essay is as vital and vivifying as his playing and BIS’s sound is of the highest quality. This is a record I shall return to for an ever-renewed sense of wonder and fascination.