Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No 1Mariinsky ****

After a third prize at Warsaw's Chopin Competition in 2010, and first prizes at Tel Aviv's Arthur Rubinstein Competition and Moscow's Tchaikovsky Competition last year, Daniil Trifonov, still only 21, is one of the hottest pianists of the moment. His take on Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto has both an exciting electricity and an appealing tenderness. And there's a sense of eagerness and spontaneity to Trifonov's playing that helps mask the fact that his approach is polarised away from the middle-ground of normal discourse. The rest of the disc is given over to solo pieces by Tchaikovsky and Chopin, and arrangements by Liszt of songs by Schubert and Schumann. Trifonov's ability to whisper as well as thunder is put to especially good use in the Liszt arrangements. url.ie/8jpy