Yundi (born in 1982), like Lang Lang, is a major musical sensation in China, where he is treated like a rock star by a generation of young devotees. China is a vast and expanding market in this area, as in many others, and if it takes celebrity promotion to get more people to fall in love with classical music, then I’m all for it! My problem concerns the narrowness of the repertoire, implying that a few recognised masterpieces exist and nothing else is worth bothering about. The farthest these young keyboard lions stray from the beaten track (apart from insipid transcriptions of traditional Chinese songs) are Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto (Lang) and Prokofiev’s Second (Yundi).

Yundi approaches Beethoven in the same manner as the showmen concert pianists of old. His elongated opening phrases of the Pathétique indicate that these will be Romantic interpretations with no Classical or period flavour. He thunders the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata as if it were Chopin’s Revolutionary Étude. This places him at a considerable stylistic distance from young European pianists who have recorded Beethoven of late, like Ingrid Fliter, Alice Sara Ott or François Frédéric Guy, all of whom display an awareness of period scale.

Yundi’s approach is best suited to the Appassionata, of which he gives an exciting performance. His technique is beyond reproach, far outshining that of a dodgier ‘phenomenon’, James Rhodes. The question however remains: with Arrau, Kempff, Schnabel, Gilels, Perahia, Lewis and others available, do we want Yundi’s version? Well, millions do.