Alessio Bax is living and urgently needed proof that competition triumphs are still meaningful; something to associate with playing of the highest calibre. His performance of Brahms’s Paganini Variations is sufficiently prodigious to invite comparison with such luminaries as Michelangeli and Géza Anda. Yet his virtuosity is effortless, lyrical and never hard-driven; and while others struggle to clarify Brahms’s potential opacity, Bax makes light of every devilish demand.

His way, too, with the more interior Brahms is no less memorable, as ardent as it is refined in the early and introspective Ballades, pianistically and musically immaculate in the hallucinatory flights of No 3 and as poetic as anyone could wish in No 4, where the music seems to have stepped straight from the pages of Brahms’s Lieder. In the Op 76 Klavierstücke, Bax captures all of Brahms’s half-lights (in No 6 in particular he offers a ravishing alternative to, say, Glenn Gould’s recorded perversity) and is unforgettably eloquent in the romantic turbulence of No 1 and in the storm clouds that race across No 5. His tone, like ‘soft incense’ with its seamless legato and glowing cantabile, makes you feel that Brahms, like Debussy, could claim that he wrote for an instrument without hammers. For his encore Bax plays Brahms/Cziffra/Bax and an arrangement of impish brilliance and glee. Signum’s sound is excellent and the company is surely blessed to have such an artist on its books.