Like many other pianists, 33-year-old Alexei Volodin is an international competition-winner and has already played with a dazzling array of conductors and in a no less impressive sea of venues. Here he makes his own contribution to this year’s Chopin festivities, offering three late masterpieces offset by the earlier salon and insinuating charms of the Impromptus. These are masterly performances of a formidable assurance but, almost without exception, they are shorn of an elegance and finesse inseparable from even Chopin’s most heroic and audacious gestures.Volodin can take a firm hand to many beguiling confidences; determined, even desperate, to avoid a hint of sentimentality, he ends up sounding curt and unsympathetic. True, he warms to the Third Impromptu’s intricate and serpentine largesse and relaxes in the Third Sonata’s Largo into a greater degree of inwardness. But the Polonaise-fantaisie flashes with a ferocious brilliance and there is a nervy rather than opulent approach to the Barcarolle’s grand opening gateway. His pedalling can be heavy rather than subtle and you will look in vain for the sort of stylish and contoured phrasing that makes Rubinstein’s (or, more recently, Perahia’s) Chopin such an unending source of joy and wonder. Listen to his way with the Third Sonata’s Allegro maestoso and I doubt whether the ever-fanciful critic James Huneker would have felt called upon to speak of “a morning freshness in its hue scent, and when it bursts a parterre of roses”. Nor would Volodin’s brutal Baba-Yaga rampage through the Scherzo have prompted him to speak of music “vivacious, charming and light as a harebell”. All in all this is a well recorded but very Russian, one-sided view of Chopin’s multifaceted genius.