A long list of international competition victories and performances grace the 39-year-old Israeli-born, American-based pianist Ran Dank’s résumé, not to mention his Juilliard studies with Emanuel Ax and Joseph Kalichstein. As such, perhaps it’s surprising that he hasn’t made a solo album until now. Still, as the saying goes, good things come to those who wait.

By interspersing William Bolcom’s Twelve New Études with works of Chopin, Dank casts provocative light on these composer-pianists, resulting in intriguing juxtapositions. For example, the arpeggiated chords at the start of Bolcom’s seventh Étude, ‘Premonitions’, contain remnants of the A flat major key so joyfully established in Chopin’s Op 42 Waltz, heard right before. Dank’s brisk reading of Chopin’s A minor ‘Émile Gaillard’ Mazurka easily dovetails into the declamatory octaves at the start of Bolcom’s ‘Scène d’opéra’. To place Chopin’s A flat Polonaise’s triumphant final chords side by side with the boldly dissonant opening flourishes of ‘Vers le silence’ can be construed either as a cheeky whim or a dramatic masterstroke.

Dank proves as stimulating a pianist as he is a programme-builder. He opens the recital with Chopin’s C minor Polonaise and treats it less like a dance than a brooding, operatically orientated prologue. As a result, Bolcom’s fast and furious first Étude that follows sounds all the more shocking in context. Étude No 3’s pointillistic writing benefits from Dank’s hair-trigger rhythm and dynamic control, while an easy lilt anchors his liberal rubato throughout Chopin’s G minor Mazurka. Op 67 No 2. The pianist characterises the waterfall-like runs and clotted tremolos of ‘Butterflies, hummingbirds’ to perfection, while his fabulous rendition of the stride piano-inspired ‘Hi jinks’ is arguably lighter and suppler than in Marc-André Hamelin’s pioneering recording (New World) – no small achievement. As for the A flat Polonaise, don’t expect swagger à la Horowitz, Rubinstein or Katchen but notice the introspective G major episode’s eloquence and personal poetry, and the uncommon thrust to the bass lines.

In all, a distinctive and excellently engineered debut by a thoughtful and seasoned artist: highly recommended.