I must confess that the name Nobuyuki Tsujii was new to me. The Japanese pianist was born as long ago as 1988 and shot to fame as the co-winner of the Van Cliburn Competition in 2009. This CD features an inspired curation of Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto and a selection of miniatures, as well as Mikhail Pletnev’s piano transcription of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker Suite. It’s interesting to see how DG is spreading its net more widely, in terms of recording orchestras, beyond the glamour set. Last year we had the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Simone Young in Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. This time it’s the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and Domingo Hindoyan.

Normally, I try sedulously to avoid terms like “enigmatic” to describe an interpretation or a  composition itself but I think in this case, I’m going to have to resort to describing Tsujii’s rendering as “a work in progress”. 

As one would expect from a DG artist, Tsujii’s technical adroitness, transparency, dynamic awareness and his coolly spectacular ability to sail through Rachmaninov’s awesome...