Ah, the impetuosity of youth, the volatility of the mood swings, the enviable I-know-everything attitude and the history-was-a-crock-and-nothing-really-mattered-until-now approach to life! Wrap it up into a musical package and you might end up with someone like Teo Gheorghiu, the brilliant Zurich-born pianist whose competition success while still a foetus stamped him as one of the wunderkinds of our age. Now, let’s not pretend that at the ripe old age of 20 he’s the world’s greatest authority on Dvořák, but when the famous opening cello theme in the Piano Quintet Op 81 sounds elegant but somehow soporific, you just know that he’s about to put a bomb under it. And, sure enough, he does, the main Allegro taking off at roughly prestissimo before the flailing adolescent fingers increase the tempo beyond all known verbal descriptions.

And so it goes throughout this impertinent, altogether exhilarating performance filled with extreme tempo and dynamic shifts, look-out-Grandma daredevilry and hold-onto-your-hat wheelies and burnouts, that make you wonder whether to scold him or applaud. Certainly one senses that the poor old Carmina Quartet, who were born in a more sober time, sound relieved to have made it unscathed through that first movement’s merciless game of catch-me-if-you-can....