What to choose for your debut album? Do you play music that is, quite simply, close to your heart, or do you come up with something novel and arresting? For Belarus-born Olga Stezhko there is no problem. She clearly has the best of both worlds, making a masterly conjunction out late Scriabin and Busoni, two of music’s truest originals. And in her assertive and compulsively readable notes, she has few hesitations. For her ‘every composition on this CD is a masterpiece’, and she advises us to listen to the whole in order to comprehend fully ‘an evocation narrative on your senses and imagination’. Again, late Scriabin is ‘simultaneously dark and enlightening, aloof and immediate – a transformation of human reason’. She has similar praise for Busoni, who continues Scriabin’s compulsive world, though in a style entirely his own.

All this is complemented by Stezhko, who is blessed with an awe-inspiring command of both idioms and total empathy for two dreamers in strange worlds. Instructions such as étrange, ailée, souffle mystérieux and onde caressant are hardly eccentric to Stezhko but show a reaching-out into starry new territory rather than leading down an obscure garden path. She takes Busoni’s Toccata by storm (for Alfred Brendel, ‘probably technically the most difficult piece that I have ever tried’) and her way with the Scriabin Preludes is entirely authentic. Not a record for the faint-hearted but rather for those who enjoy dark and menacing regions of the mind. This is an outstanding debut, finely recorded by Luminum Records.