Anyone recording Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto faces intimidating competition, not least from the composer himself, Horowitz – most of all in his 1941 disc with Barbirolli – Cliburn, Gilels and Argerich. Yet while I would never claim such charisma for Nelson Goerner, one of the finest of today’s young pianists, I would always pay tribute to his musical ease and fluency.

His poetic perspective is refreshingly alert and clear, his musicianship exemplary rather than over-heated or heart-on-sleeve. Yet if you claim that his performance is not attention-seeking you could also say that it rarely rivets the attention. Rachmaninov’s turbulent emotional life is aristocratically distanced rather than ‘stewed in Russian juices’.

Not that he lacks power. The climax of the cadenza (he chooses the better of the two which is very much in keeping with his conception of the Concerto) has plenty of rhetorical force and so has his depth-charge launch of the finale. He can spin off the intricacies of the waltz variation in the central Intermezzo with delightful insouciance. Such things are exceptional even when they do not alter one’s more general sense of an honesty that misses, I was about to write, the spark of a live performance (in fact it was taken from a Bridgewater Hall concert).

You could say that Goerner finds his truest voice in his selection of Preludes, whether in the magical oasis of calm of the G major or the outsize virtuosity of the B flat. For good measure he adds Blumenfeld’s Left-hand Etude, leaving you to marvel at his single-handed strength and to feel that, overall, his disc is outstanding if not inimitable.