Since bursting on to the British classical music scene as an uncannily mature 11 year-old, taking out the keyboard final of the 2004 BBC Young Musician Competition, pianist Benjamin Grosvenor’s meteoric rise has been likened to that of Russian superstar Evgeny Kissin.

Recording with Decca by the age of 19, and astounding the audience at the first night of the Proms in London in that same year, Grosvenor’s career has been the stuff of Hollywood.

It would be easy to have your head turned by all this adulation but it doesn’t seem to be the case with this fifth son of a Southend piano teaching mother and English teacher father. And apparently he is his own fiercest critic, often recording his recitals to see where there’s room for improvement.

I don’t know if this recital in the Utzon Series at the Sydney Opera House was recorded, but it would be hard to imagine that it could have been bettered.

Opening with two preludes and fugues from Mendelssohn’s Op. 35 collection, the first fugue showing the composer’s reverence for JS Bach whose works he championed when they fell out of favour as being “too old fashioned”, Grosvenor showed not only the prodigious security of...