Time was when many celebrated pianists quailed before certain works. Myra Hess sat bemused in front of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, not daring to play it in public. Until Horowitz took it so formidably in hand the Liszt Sonata was considered unplayable, while Clara Schumann considered Brahms’s Paganini Variations “witch variations” filled with cruel and unspeakable demands. Not so today’s generation; and as on her previous DG album (which understandably helped her to win the Gramophone Young Artist of the Year Award in 2009) Yuja Wang makes light of even the fiercest complexity.

In Stravinsky’s Petrushka her youthful verve and jagged accentuation colour every bar of the “Danse russe”, and how she relishes the puppets’ quizzical mood-swings from gaiety to desperation in “Chez Pétrouchka”! Here and most of all in “La semaine grasse” she has a dazzling way of lightening even the heaviest textures so that her entire performance gleams with an astonishing brilliance and verve. This is even truer of her Brahms Paganini Variations, making the reordering of both books a marginal rather than serious consideration. Try Var 11 from Book 2 or the Variation coda (No 14) to Book 1 and then hear her in Var 12 from Book 2 and you will find her as musically beguiling as she is breathtakingly fleet. In Ravel’s La valse her dynamics range from the merest whisper to an elemental uproar (try the final cataclysmic pages) and as if this was not enough she gives us an oasis of calm in two Scarlatti sonatas. For her, the second (K466 in F minor/C major) is like “air after rain” and it would be hard to imagine playing of a more delicate emotional fervour. This entire recital leaves you in no doubt that at 23 Yuja Wang is already among the most brilliantly gifted of today’s pianists.