Roman Rabinovich was born in 1985 in Tashkent and studied in Israel and at the Juilliard School. He has given acclaimed Haydn performances in the UK and America, including a complete sonata cycle in Bath. Such experience shows, as he launches what promises to be a survey of all the sonatas for First Hand Records.

It’s an auspicious start. Rabinovich responds to this ever-inventive music with a broad palette of tone and touch, sweetly singing in the cantabile slow movements and with fluent dexterity in the fingery fast movements. There’s wit, too, in finales and a wide range of dynamics drawn from his Steinway Model D, sensitively recorded at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

The fly in the ointment is the competition. If you wish to follow a recorded Haydn sonata cycle from scratch, you certainly won’t be disappointed by Rabinovich and it would be worthwhile to collect his discs as they appear. Longer-standing Haydnistas, though, will already own recent selections by the likes of Marc-André Hamelin (Hyperion) or Leif Ove Andsnes (EMI/Warner), and the seven volumes that have so far appeared of Jean Efflam Bavouzet’s highly regarded complete overview. Comparing, as an example, the B minor Sonata, No 32, with which Rabinovich’s two-disc set concludes, one finds a greater sense of Sturm und Drang danger in the performances by the more established pianists. Hamelin, especially, mesmerises in the whirling finale. Bavouzet, too, engages with this music on so many levels – musicologically as well as interpretatively – in a way that is unique to himself and, I suspect, impossible to imitate. Nevertheless, the newcomer is a disc of individual charms and insights, and the development of the cycle as it unfolds will, without doubt, be well worth further listening.