At first, the programme for this recital might seem haphazard, with two excerpts from Iberia separated by Scriabin and Kapustin and followed by Beethoven and Ligeti. But as Yuja Wang fuses the disparate music into a single, coherent arc, she annihilates any fears of randomness. How does she do it?

Certainly, we’re held in her grip by the electricity of her playing, which gives no chance to demur. Precipitous tempos are part of it. More important is her variety of articulation, including bold accents that break apart the music’s regularity and shock us into attention. And more important still are the clarity of detail, the dynamic range and the timbral variety that sharpen the music’s profile. The results are often surprising. The clipped opening of the Beethoven, a flick rather than a sigh, introduces a journey dotted with unfamiliar landscapes.

More stimulating, though, is the way she unites the programme by bringing out the composers’ shared delight in textural play. Rarely have the intricacies of Albéniz’s and Ligeti’s interweaving voices emerged with such resilience – but the same is true of her Beethoven (stripped, alas, of most of its repeats). Here, what can sound like conventional accompaniments in other hands bristle with interest, as she pulls surprises from the background like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat. Few other pianists, except Glenn Gould and Marc-André Hamelin, can create such a sense of conversation and confrontation among superimposed lines.

Yet for all the brilliance and intensity, Wang is never stiff (the flexible tempos in the third movement of the Scriabin will mesmerise you), and you never get the sense of excess that so often stems from listening to such brass-knuckle players as Simon Barere. Rather, the recital is suffused by an infectious joy. Not even Pierre-Laurent Aimard (Sony, 1/97) plays Ligeti’s ‘L’escalier du diable’ with such a sly, jazzy exuberance. More engaging yet is the warm smile she gives the Márquez. For all its energy, the familiar Danzón No 2 is a nostalgic piece about memory filtered through old age – and the still-youthful Wang manages to invest it with it an ineffable grace. That work, her second encore, serves as a pivot in the recital. Perhaps to protect us from the musical equivalent of the bends, she returns us gradually to the outside world by ending her recital with the Brahms and the Gluck/Sgambati, two even more graceful pieces that remind us of just how beautiful her sound can be, and leaving us – as Jed Distler puts it in his illuminating notes – ‘improbably serene’.

Any complaints? I do wish that DG wasn’t so scrupulous about removing any trace of the audience: there are no gasps of astonishment, no bursts of applause even at the end of the concert, as there are on Wang’s Berlin and Verbier recitals. As a result, there’s little sense of a specific occasion. But that’s a minor blemish on another triumph for the pianist.