After two hearings, this disc provoked two contradictory responses. My initial notes concluded that Trifonov was blessed with fabulous fingers but evinced little emotional engagement. His touch seemed shallow, his tone unvarying and his sole concern to get through the music as fast as possible, a heartless scamper through the scherzo section of the Concerto’s second movement being a case in point. But perhaps I was missing something. This was, after all, the winner of the 2011 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition. I left the disc for a couple of days before returning to it.

The Concerto remained defiantly uninvolving. Recorded, be it noted, in two separate sessions two months apart, it sounds like a work played too often in an expertly despatched, well-worn routine. On the other hand, I warmed more to the solo works after a second hearing, Tchaikovsky’s dainty homage to Chopin followed by the Polish composer’s Barcarolle providing welcome relief after the Concerto’s bombast. Here Trifonov, though not a young man who cares to linger by the wayside, makes the instrument sing and allows the music to breathe. The six Liszt song transcriptions show him at his best, triumphantly capturing all the despair of ‘Erlkönig’, though not with such subtle characterisation as Grigory Ginzburg (1948 in a confined acoustic), with his deft leggiero touch coming into its own in a joyful rendition of ‘Die Forelle’.

A pianist, then, with a great international career in front to him (no doubt about that) but who, on this evidence, impresses more with his glittering technical skill than as a poet of the piano.