With its relatively short duration, five-language notes, moody photographs and generous space allotted to sponsors (Breguet Watches of Switzerland, who also support the Geneva competition), a feeling of luxury attends this issue. For some reason it comes to the UK only as a digital-only album. Yet the playing itself is of a very high order, as befits a Geneva first prize and Tchaikovsky Silver Medal winner.

The 27-year-old Russian has a rare feeling for the gentle wistfulness of Medtner’s ‘Canzona serenata’ and ‘Danza col canto’, and he is no less at home in the more Schumannesque solidity of the ‘Danza sinfonica’. But it is above all the Scriabin Sonata-fantasy that reveals his credentials as a poet-pianist. His exquisite shaping and layering of textures makes for an unusually private experience of the first movement, and the sheer Fingerfertigkeit he brings to the Presto finale is a thing of wonder. I have always thought of this as one of the less than fully assured of Scriabin’s sonatas but Shishkin has challenged that perception, making me want to sit down and learn it properly.

He brings a similarly cultured approach to the Rachmaninov Second Sonata. Disdaining temptations to let the fortissimos detonate and the pianissimos languish, he presents it as a thoroughly musical, integrated whole. True, the agogic hesitations that accompany this approach detract somewhat from the thrust and thrill normally associated with the piece, and there were times when I felt a lack of the last ounce of sheer power and grandeur – maybe a symptom of not enough body weight behind the sound?

I would like to hear Shishkin live before being too confident in that last verdict. The sound quality here is fine, but with a slight tendency to thinness in piano and glassiness in forte (the high points in the Tchaikovsky Scherzo feel just a little tight). Not that this will discourage me from returning to his Medtner and Scriabin for inspiration.