Boris Berezovsky delivers the notes of the B flat Concerto with Olympian ease. What the gods bestowed on him doesn’t, however, include empathy for the richness and multifariousness of Brahms. With tempi pressed ever harder in the quick movements, the concerto is traversed rather than interpreted, and there’s little exploration of the music behind the notes. Nicholas Angelich’s recording gives us variousness and subtleties, and an ideal balance of grandeur and intimacy throughout, but none of that’s on offer here. This is the concerto as a high-octane virtuoso number. It made me wonder whether Tchaikovsky, who loathed Brahms, might have enjoyed it played this way.

Connoisseurs of piano-playing will find plenty to astonish them and I do not discount the musical pleasures that fluency and beauty of sound of this order can bring. But oh dear, the wood and the trees. The dimensions of the territory are on view but the terrain has received little in the way of nurture – and it might be said a lot of the trees appear to have been felled. The slipshod detail becomes an increasing irritation: try the opening of the finale, where the articulation of the dotted rhythm comes out almost as a triplet. Hard to overlook, too, are the many faults of internal balance. The orchestra is valiant but lacks first-desk principals of quality, and the bass-heavy sound tends to be muddy.

The second book of Paganini Variations gives us more of the same. Berezovsky, flying by the seat of his pants, displays an agility few could rival but the performance is one-dimensional and the manner of it heartless. I recall with pleasure the exceptional quality of some of Berezovsky’s other recordings, when his heart and mind have been engaged, but I don’t think anyone could claim this is among them.