IT'S not easy to make as frequently heard and popular a work as Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto sound fresh. But that's exactly what the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov managed at the National Concert Hall last night.

Sokolov took first prize in the 1966 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the age of 16 but, outside of his native country, his career appears to have been slow to blossom.

He is a player with a big technique, but one who is as interested in the sound which whispers or caresses as the one which brassily craves attention. In other words, he's a player of both power and delicacy, though if I had to choose a single word for his performance of the Tchaikovsky it would be spacious - in the sense that he creates space in which to explore and shape (without fussiness) details which other performers are wont to pass heedlessly by.

It was a real pleasure to encounter a player whose thought provokingly different approach to this piece was so little dependent on the cheap thrills of raw bravura, although there was bravura aplenty when Sokolov chose. I haven't enjoyed a live performance of the piece so much, or heard one that was so little dependent on the routines of what you might call received performance practice, since Mark Zeltser (whatever happened to him?), played it 10 years ago or more, with the same orchestra in the same venue.

The influence of conductor Stefan Sanderling in the concerto was surprisingly negative with, in particular, an unacceptably bizarre failure to fathom the soloist's choice of speeds. Slackness of rhythmic tension and shortage of characterisation also bedevilled the opening suite from Rimsky Korsakov's opera, The Snow Maiden. And, while the orchestral colouring of Dvorak's Eighth Symphony was made alluring there was underlying it a doggedly un Dvorakan earnestness which sounded altogether too laboured for the music.