..."Kobrin unleashed a fiery, bright-toned account of Chopin’s Douze Études, Op 25. These technical exercises, each designed to highlight a different pianistic problem, were delivered with transparent clarity — just the job for the Summer Academy students in the audience, who gave Kobrin a well-deserved standing ovation at the end."

He surrendered neither the smoothness nor the dynamic fluidity that the modern piano allows, and he gave his sense of fantasy free rein, using a shapely bass line to suggest drama in the opening Allegro and creating an almost confessional spirit in the central Andante cantabile.

Russian pianist Alexander Kobrin's dazzling dexterity certainly seemed supernatural to see…

The final notes had barely faded before the audience seemed to rise as one, cheering.

His conceptions of music are always interesting, convincing [and] beautifully played

He effortlessly generated a wide variety of tone colors and paid exquisite attention to the tiniest of phrasing details in Tchaikovsky’s war horse, the B-flat minor concerto.

I have left the best to last. I first heard 25 year-old Moscow-born Alexander Kobrin when I was chairman of the 1998 Scottish international Piano Competition. Then his first prize-winning performances were more athletically than musically motivated. Now his playing has broadened to become mernorably personal and stylish. In Rachmaninov’s Op 33 Etudes-tableaux, everything is boldly and vitally characterised, the vertiginous whirlwind of No 5 in E flat minor turned from the usual manic chase into a superbly shaded and inflected drama. Both here and in the Second Sonat a(played in the 1931 revision), despite fire-storms of virtuosity, there is always room for everything to tell and Kobrin achieves a hypnotic sense of the music's dark necromancy. Brahms's Paganini Variations(for Clara Schumann, his ‘witch' Variations) are awe-inspiringly assured and any lingering doubts are silenced by a special imaginative delicacy in Chopin’s B major Nocturne. Harmonia Mundi's lavish presentation comes in excellent sound.

…He played down the work's blockbuster qualities in favor of its lyricism, which he couched in a thoughtfully shaped, singing line. That isn't to say that he ignored the fireworks entirely, and when he addressed the barnstorming passages on their own terms, he did so with a steely edge and ample - if thoroughly controlled - force

Alex Kobrin’s interpretative musicianship was here at its very best, as he delivered a reading of considerable insight.

What a depth of feeling in the pathetique [of the Haydn Sonata in F] Adagio, and what delicate touch to the Minuet with his celebratory manner! The Sonata in E minor was delivered with the same stroke of elegance, grace and spirit. Likewise [in] the performance of Robert Schumann’s Kinderszenen op.15…sensitivity and gracefulness elevated the performance into a special treat for the ears…Kobrin knew how to set all the different kinds of tone colours and structures against each other to create contrast, and to illuminate tensions between light and shade, brightness and melancholy in a multiple of layers.

Images of shimmering water and airy bells emerged from the concerto's dreamy slow movement. Kobrin's rubato -- that is, his stretching of phrases -- was tasteful while still furnishing a sense of freedom and space. An etude-like virtuosity was given full expression in the final movement.