There comes a time in any young piano virtuoso’s life when the need mounts for breaking out of the core 19th-century repertoire into the wide, wild world beyond. You can’t always be wrapped around Chopin and Liszt. Alongside oriental trinkets, that smiling Chinese onslaught Lang Lang has become an improbable concert interpreter of the thickets of notes in Tippett’s Piano Concerto. For his second concerto CD, Yundi Li, Lang Lang’s compatriot (born the same year, too, 1982), has been more cautious. He has chosen Prokofiev No 2, in a Berlin live performance from May.

Technically the work is not an easy option. Nor does the concerto sit easily on the listeners’ ears. It hammers. It glowers. The Russian romantic tradition is taken and skewered into schizophrenia. In some hands and acoustics, you emerge from a performance battered into a wraith. Yundi Li doesn’t stint on the clatter and madcap preening, yet the performance still leans toward the emollient. Put that down partly to the Deutsche Grammophon recording’s round, resonant ambience and the gleam of the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. An ugly noise from this crew seems impossible.

The more Lang Lang’s performances drift into candelabra rhetoric – the Liberace style of playing – the greater the attraction of Yundi Li’s sobriety. Maybe this Prokofiev could be more tigerish, yet Yundi’s dizzy dexterity and ability to shade colours within the composer’s dark and narrow band gave sufficient pleasure to me. To the Berlin audience also: the performance concludes with their roars of applause.

Brighter pleasures are offered by the second concerto on the CD, Ravel’s in G major, a real blaze of sunshine. Much of the delight here is orchestral; the way Ozawa juggles Ravel’s shifting textures in the first movement is masterly. Some instrumental details get smothered in the acoustic; but many more seem revealed for the first time, and the slow movement’s veiled filigree is wonderful. The adagio is also where Yundi Li shines the most, tenderly probing his solo, supplying glancing rubato. Here and elsewhere, other pianists may be more demonstrative with their emotions, but his poetic phrasing, nose for structure and lack of cheap glitter still give us a substantial musical meal.

(Deutsche Grammophon, TMS £12.99, call 0845 6026328)

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