With their exhilarating brilliance and mesmerising beauty, these pieces have captured the imagination of players and audiences alike...These works are here to stay, in the distinguished line of études stretching back via Debussy to Chopin. They require even more virtuosity, sometimes of a brain-teasing sort, and Danny Driver supplies it all, beginning with rock-solid attack in the polyrhythms of ‘Désordre’.

In essence, Driver’s Ligeti Études complement rather than compete with Aimard and Ullén, and that’s high praise.

Driver’s finest performance is ‘L’escalier du diable’ (unsurprisingly No 13), which hypnotises the listener with its jagged ‘staircases’. A wonderful release, recorded with Hyperion’s characteristically excellent piano sound.

Driver’s clarity and brilliance across the whole dazzling gamut of these three sets of studies (composed between 1985 and 2001) will take your breath away – so much so, in fact, that you might want to take a couple of intervals along the way to let it all sink in! His technical wizardry in pieces like L'escalier du diable and Der Zauberlehrling (both from Book 2) is knock-out stuff, but he’s equally beguiling in the more lyrical moments, such as the lovely Arc-en-ciel toward the end of Book 1.

Driver’s performances certainly leave no doubt of the music’s dazzling originality and enduring importance…it’s clearly music that he admires hugely and understands profoundly