When pianist Piers Lane heard Moye Chen’s audition tape for the 2016 Sydney International Piano Competition of Australia he felt the hairs prickling on the back of his neck. Praise doesn’t come much higher than that, and two years later the 33-year-old Beijing-born virtuoso was back here to promote his debut album Four Worlds on the Deutsche Grammophon label as part of the Utzon Series.

Instead of the intimate Utzon Room this concert was held in the Studio, a more formal space which is not usually used for classical music. The flow of the concert was hindered by the fact that the printed programs had not arrived and regular announcements had to be made to introduce the dozen or so works on the bill. These were all written by three naturalised American virtuoso pianist-composers in Sergei Rachmaninov, Percy Grainger and Vladimir Horowitz. There were also quite a few fidgeting children in the audience who might have been better entertained at the Peppa Pig’s Surprise which was showing next door in the Playhouse. All this aside, Chen demonstrated why his brand of expressive and dynamic pianism,...