Sometimes I think I’ve been unlucky with my experiences of Sokolov, so mixed have my impressions been from both live performances and recordings.

The Beethoven CD here gives me at least something of what I feel I have been missing: which is to say, not just the familiar orchestral range of volume and timbre, the exceptional rhythmic control, the superior articulation, the furious energy and drive, but also a subtlety of weighting and a sense of fantasy at precisely the appropriate structural moments (the end of the Op 2 No 3 Sonata’s slow movement is a special case in point; he has a momentary brain-freeze in the opening bar of this movement, but in live performance that is entirely forgivable). Sokolov respects the pedal markings that even some specialists shy away from (as in the third Bagatelle) and even when his accents border on the excessive, there is sanction in the score. Warning bells nevertheless sound at times, especially in the Bagatelles. The risoluto of No 5 is amplified to the point of brutality, for instance, and the urge towards hyper-characterisation feels in places more like Prokofievian caricature than Beethoven.

Sokolov’s tendency to smother more intimate numbers in a blanket of affection becomes more seriously problematic in Brahms. Everything here is so over-inflected that it tends to come across as merely spasmodic: the nuances as though applied from outside rather than arising from the music itself, the rhythms more hobbling and hesitant than flowing and expressive. I tried my darnedest to give this approach the benefit of the doubt but by the time I reached Op 119 it had become unbearable. Here the first Intermezzo feels suffocating in its embrace, the agitato of the second demonstrates a weird idea of un poco, the grazioso of the third sounds mannered and the last is once again overblown in its uber-risoluto.

The CDs are recorded in three different venues and the Brahms pieces are greatly inferior in quality to the rest, the sound being diffuse and cloudy. Having said that, there is unquestionable distinction in some of the encores, above all in the melancholy of ‘Des pas sur la neige’.

But then there is the DVD, which is something of a revelation. For one thing the camera angles – tastefully and intelligently used – put the mechanics of Sokolov’s exceptional technique under the spotlight. To the trained eye they show how he uses all the ‘levers’ – from the body through to the fingertips – to prepare the sound, to transfer the weight from one note to the next and to guarantee clarity, power and nuance. For another thing, the performance of Beethoven’s Op 111 is outstanding in any terms: for its peerless articulation, its unremitting intensity and its fine pacing (no trace here of the lazy misreading of tempo relations in the variations that has so often provoked my pique in these pages). The Op 90 Sonata is also deeply impressive in an austere, uncompromising way that never seeks to ingratiate.

The same virtues applied to Mozart and Chopin may win fewer admirers. Sokolov’s obsessive investment of every note with meaning, combined with his bell-like sonority, can render the effect paradoxically ‘notey’, at the same as it is technically phenomenal. Once again, though, there are breathtaking things in the encores, and once again it is the Debussy (‘Canope’) to which I unreservedly surrender.