The microphone has been Sokolov’s declared enemy for some while, in the concert hall as well as the studio, so I suppose we must be grateful for what’s offered here. There’s nothing more recent than 1988; two of the Beethoven sonatas and the Arapov Concerto are taken from public concerts; and I guess some of the rest derives from broadcasts – almost certainly the Scriabin Sonata No 3, from 1972, which is wonderfully played but not immaculate down to the tiniest detail. It is also minus a precise start to its slow movement (disc 2, tr 3), which has been faded up as if no one would be likely to miss a dropped beat or two – we join the music somewhere in the first full bar. Whoever was responsible for this was evidently in the wrong job. No medals either to any of the other sound engineers. By far the best sound is heard in the Beethoven Sonata Op 10 No 3, dating from 1974, which fizzes with life and is clean as a whistle – a studio recording perhaps? These two items show us the already exceptional quality of Sokolov in his early twenties.

Scriabin’s sonatas are on a par with (most of) Prokofiev’s in my affections, and Sokolov in No 3, not often come by these days, is to the manner born and up there alongside Horowitz’s version and Vladimir Sofronitsky’s in his authority and natural feeling for getting the music off the page. As a Beethoven player, however, he gives me pause. Everything is pushed to extremes. You can hardly fail to get pleasure from the detailing of a master pianist who responds so generously to every moment. Absolutely no dead patches. The trouble is, with such heightened projection of every incident, the pulse gets dragged this way and that (sometimes rhythms too), and the bigger shapes, looming out of the mist, are only fitfully established. It is a go-stop manner and you get an assemblage of bits, often with no big experience. I except here the D major Sonata from Op 10, which is full of surprises and idiosyncrasies yet carries an authentic voice. And after doubts I accepted more readily Sokolov’s vividness in the two-movement E minor Sonata, Op 90, having in mind Beethoven’s reported descriptions of the first movement as a ‘contest between head and heart’ and of the lyrical rondo as ‘a conversation with the beloved’. In the last Beethoven sonata, the great Op 111, I’m less sure of him. The turmoil of the first movement, its intensity sustained almost throughout, suits him well; but the semplice manner Beethoven asks for in the Arietta isn’t attained or really attempted. At a full four minutes longer than two other versions I’ve been listening to lately, its vision of peace is surrendered to a rather tedious world-weariness.

Boris Arapov, a contemporary of Shostakovich, taught generations of students at the Leningrad Conservatoire, where he was director of the composition faculty from the mid-1970s until his death in 1992. He seems to have been revered as a teacher while obliged as a composer, I daresay, to live in Shostakovich’s shadow. He wrote seven symphonies, stage music, some chamber works and five piano sonatas, of which No 2 is dedicated to Sokolov. It is just short of 10 minutes, playing continuously – out of Scriabin one could say. It promises more than it achieves. The Triple Concerto (1973) with chamber orchestra has a dedication to the memory of Stravinsky and is longer, in three movements; likewise, my hopes weren’t delivered. Could its gesturing and rambling continuity have been more convincing?