Nikolai Demidenko's large-scale pianism suits Busoni's Bach transcriptions to a tee. Listen first to the E minor prelude; you sense that Demidenko truly revels in the music's declamatory syntax and booming bass lines. Part of this may have to do with the pianist's Fazioli concert grand, whose resonance cuts like a saber wrapped in a velvet cloak. Demidenko sculpts fluid paragraphs out of the D major fugue's superficially repetitious sequences, and takes the hybrid Fantasia, Adagio, and Fugue at a brisk, vehement clip. The pianist forges an effortless link between the unfinished fugue's last measures and Busoni's unmistakably crabbed conclusion.

With this disc Demidenko completes his cycle of the Prokofiev Concertos with the London Philharmonic and Alexander Lazarev. The First Concerto launched the youthful composer's career—he wrote it for his graduation concert (his playing of it won him first prize) and its youthful high spirits and virtuosity make it an instant crowd-pleaser. The Fourth and Fifth Concertos are less well known though with the Fifth it is hard to see why. The Fourth was written for the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein who didn't like it (he didn't like Ravel's left-hand Concerto either!) and refused to perform it; hence it is only recently that the work has been taken up.

Nikolai Demidenko is a celebrated piano virtuoso, considered a leading exponent of the Russian school of playing. His blend of technical brilliance and musical vision have earned him consistent raves since he first emerged on the international scene in the mid-1980s, and he has become a musical fixture in his adopted home of Great Britain, where he gained citizenship in 1995. Demidenko began playing before the age of five, learning on his grandfather's old, beaten-up piano. By the age of six, he was a student of Anna Kantor (Evgeny Kissin's teacher) at the Gnessin School of Music. An obstinate student who disliked scales and technique, Demidenko still made swift progress, and he eventually entered the Moscow Conservatory. There, he studied with Dmitri Bashkirov, whom Demidenko credits with fostering his more individual qualities as a player, as well as ironing out the remaining wrinkles in his technique. Reaching the finals of both the 1976 Montreal competition and the 1978 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow (where he played through an acute case of the flu) served as a final springboard to professional recognition.

Composer, conductor, administrator, impresario, creative writer, acid critic, sometime painter, aspiring philosopher, classical symphonist, opera romantic, profound nationalist … blessed with the melodic flowering of a Mozart, the technical facility of a Mendelssohn … a man, conscious of his genius, ‘always honest and selfless in his dealings with his fellow men and with the art he loved’ (Autobiographical Sketch, Dresden, 14 March 1818) … put on a pedestal by all the post-Beethovenites, the inspiration of Mahler and Debussy, of Hindemith and Stravinsky: Carl Maria von Weber was, by universal consent, a great pianist in an age of great virtuosi.

A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, Nikolai Medtner, a Russian of distant German descent, studied under Pabst, Sapelnikov and Safonov at the Moscow Conservatoire, graduating in 1900 with the coveted Anton Rubinstein Prize. Admired as a pianist of particularly formidable attainment and inventive imagination, he held important teaching appointments at the Conservatoire (1909/10, 1914/21) before eventually leaving Russia for periods of domicile in Germany, the USA and Paris. In the winter of 1935/36 he settled in England, making his home in the Golders Green area of north London.

A highly enjoyable disc. The clarity and precision of (Demidenko s) playing are impeccable, both tonally and rhythmically. Demidenko is brilliant and he revels in it… There is so much here to enjoy!