Chopin is this man’s bread-and-butter. Chinese pianist Yundi has been a high-profile, specialist purveyor of Chopin since taking first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2000 – and at age 18, its youngest ever winner. He is marketed as a phenom, single-named, focused on a single composer, and on the front line of China’s western classical music revolution.

Once the lights dim, however, all this recedes, leaving just player and instrument. And Chopin. Yundi certainly conveys the impression of someone in relationship with the composer, and at Thursday’s performance there was no doubt that the pianist’s primary concern is poetry rather than display.

Therefore, and despite the technical fireworks inevitable in an all-Chopin programme, the single word which consistently comes to mind as the recital’s overarching principle is reflection.

The four Ballades lend themselves to reflection. Yundi creates a sense of time, of a slow, meditative spontaneity that does away with bar-lines and tempos, in the simple, lyrical opening at the start of each one. And as the ensuing texture grows in complexity and the technical demands increase, you never lose sight of that initial state of reflection which informes each performance, even in the stormiest passages.

As a result, at no point did virtuosity for its own sake ever enter into the equation, and Yundi’s playing never seemed to be about him, but always about an inner conversation with Chopin.

This impression isn’t quite so strong in the 24 Op. 28 Preludes, due in part to the fact that they are a sequence of miniatures, as well as to the way he hurries from one to the next, seemingly in the hopes of suppressing the audience’s appetite to applaud after each (or, as in the fourth Ballade, in during the piece).

Instead, there is a more pointed contrast between the gentler pieces and the firey ones.