For youthful bravura, technique to burn and heart-on-sleeve emotion, you need look no further: 26-year-old Macedonian virtuoso Simon Trpceski is your man. His sheer voltage makes the final pages of Rachmaninov’s Second Sonata erupt and fulminate in elemental uproar. And when has the sequence of massive chords just before the close of the B flat Prelude been reeled off with more pulverising weight and velocity?

At the other extreme, Trpceski’s exceptionally slow tempo for the Prelude in F sharp minor, Op 23 No 1, paints a picture of the utmost despondency and desolation. The B flat minor Prelude from Op 32 is most imaginatively voiced, and if the popular G minor Prelude, Op 23 No 5, seems to have put on weight and muscle since we last met it, the middle section (among Rachmaninov’s greatest glories) is sung and caressed with a special affection.

True, Trpceski’s enthusiasm can spill over into parody (his over-vehement close to the D major Prelude, Op 23 No 4). The Mendelssohn- Rachmaninov Scherzo is heavy-handed after Rachmaninov himself and the ever-mercurial Moiseiwitsch; and Trpceski’s way with the Second Sonata (in the truncated 1931 revision, alas), for all its aplomb, does not rival bench- mark recordings by Cliburn, Horowitz, Ashkenazy and Howard Shelley (who offers both versions on Hyperion). Churlish, too, to evoke a different sort of musical maturity, a more subtle distinction (Moura Lympany, whose 1951 set of the Preludes is reissued on Testament and Decca) when so much is offered here.

If Rachmaninov is more multi-faceted that these performances sometimes suggest, Trpceski’s exultance will make even the most sanguine listener’s pulse race.