Steering a balanced course between imaginative vitality and warmth on one side and resigned melancholy on the other can be difficult, but Nicholas Angelich manages it with a kind of panache. He takes you to the brink of inconsolable sadness one moment, only to put a refreshingly spring in the step of a dance movement the next.

Trenchant, focused Brahms from a formidable player . . . . Nicholas Angelich is an American pianist, trained in Paris, whose performances on this disc are of a wholly exceptional drama, sweep and impeccable craftsmanship. Few young pianists have so little truck with flighty, salon-ish alternatives to seriousness, and his Brahms is sufficiently authoritative to make one long to hear him in the piano concertos. . . . . Angelich’s is nonetheless among the finest recordings of Brahms’s formidable masterpiece.