The Armenian artist Sergei Babayan is perhaps best known as Daniil Trifonov’s sometime teacher and mentor. It is presumably thanks to his links with him that Babayan has now been signed as a DG artist: this marks his first solo album for the yellow label. Yet a glance at the booklet shows that these recordings were made over a decade ago, in Hamburg in 2009. It’s a pity they’ve taken so long to see the light of day, for this is a very impressive recital. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’d rather hear Babayan play Rachmaninov than Trifonov, for his playing has a naturalness that is very telling. The programme itself has been carefully thought through – not for Babayan aimless complete recordings of Preludes or Études-tableaux, though works of both genres are included, sitting alongside Moments musicaux and other shorter pieces.

Babayan has a particularly close relationship with the composer’s music, its discovery proving a saving grace to the teenage pianist when he’d all but lost interest in the piano. That is evident from the off, with an enticing A flat Prelude, Op 23 No 8, whose flickering filigree is effortlessly rendered. Even the most well-known pieces here have a freshness that comes not from gimmickry but from a sense of deep connection – the G sharp minor Prelude, Op 32 No 12, for instance, which is wonderfully songlike; or his simple way with the composer’s own arrangement of ‘Lilacs’. Initially, I wondered if Babayan’s pace for the third of the Op 33 Études-tableaux was perhaps just a little too steady, Steven Osborne by comparison getting more flow at a very marginally faster tempo, but by the end I was won over by the sheer tenderness of his playing.

He includes two of Arcadi Volodos’s arrangements: the Melody, Op 21 No 9 and the Andante from the Cello Sonata. If Babayan can’t rival Volodos’s genius for colour – who can? – he finds instead an irresistible sense of narrative that makes for some beguiling storytelling.

Other highlights are many – the first two pieces in the Op 39 Études-tableaux, for instance, in which the driving energy of No 1 is ameliorated by the wide-eyed wonder of the second, in which he has all of Melnikov’s sense of rapture but with a greater sense of forward movement. And even in the most ringing of climaxes Babayan’s sound is always cushioned. That lack of harshness serves him well in the tumult of the terse Prelude in F minor, Op 32 No 6, which is more overtly furious than in Lugansky’s recent account. Again making an impression out of all proportion to its actual length is the Morceau de fantaisie, with its flickering textures that surely grow from Chopin’s music. To end, a pair of the Moments musicaux – the darting accompaniment always subservient to the melody in No 2, while in the C major No 6 he finds a grandeur that is surely influenced by the bell sounds so beloved of this composer.