Dvorák’s Piano Concerto is a problematic work. Even Sviatoslav Richter admitted that it remained among his greatest challenges, referring to many opaque and unpianistic demands that take their lead from the Brahms concertos. Attempts to make the solo part more grateful and accessible by Vilem Kurtz, Firkusny and Reizenstein hardly improved matters and it is surely significant that Primakov and Helmchen, the Concerto’s newest recorded champions, have returned to the original score.

Both pianists are clearly in love with music that releases its secrets slowly, the truth lying somewhere between Primakov’s delicacy and brilliance and Helmchen’s greater introspection. Both achieve their goal in making even the most workaday passages somehow take wing. And elsewhere their warmth is almost palpable in, for example, the finale’s second subject contrast to the prevailing folk-dance element or in the central Andante’s Chopinesque tracery. Echoes of Beethoven, Brahms and (amusingly) Liszt’s Grand Chromatic Galop at the close of the Andante are resolved where Dvorák struggles to find an identity which achieved its fullest glory in the later Cello Concerto.

Choice between these two recordings will perhaps depend on their couplings, a perhaps overly respectable way with the Schumann Piano Concerto from Helmchen and a magical and scintillating realisation of Dvorák’s Poetic Tone-Pictures by Primakov. Both pianists are finely partnered and recorded, but personally I would go for Primakov, not forgetting Richter’s own superb performance on EMI’s Great Recordings of the Century label (9/77^R).