First the good news: Cédric Tiberghien, master of tone colour, lucidity and expressive intent, playing the 24 Chopin Preludes plus the Bach C major and the C minor Nocturne in the red-gold dragons' den of the Royal Pavilion's Music Room.

Reaching for philosophical terms seems appropriate enough for two deep thinkers among Russian pianists (strictly speaking, Kolesnikov is Siberian-born, London-based). In what Kant defined as the phenomenal world, the tangible circumstances, there were equal if not always predictable measures of innocence and experience in these Wigmore recitals two days apart.

Living-museum recitals on a variety of historic instruments pose logistical problems. Telling The Arts Desk about his award-nominated CD of mostly 19th-century works for horns and pianos, Alec Frank-Gemmill remarked on the near-impossibility of reproducing the experiment in the concert-hall: playing on four period horns would need several intervals, and colleague Alasdair Beatson would hardly be likely to have the four pianos in the same room.

Power and intelligence combined make Sarajevo-born British pianist Ivana Gavrić stand out from the crowd. Bass lines are clear and strong; right-hand melodies move in keenly articulated song. The first half of her recital progressed with well-earthed, dancing energy to a strong clincher in Chopin's B flat minor Scherzo.

I was recently in the UK for some solo recitals and to make my debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. One of the highlights of the trip was playing a similar programme in two very different settings: first on some magnificent period instruments and then a week later on a modern Steinway piano at Wigmore Hall. Having never before performed publicly on historical instruments, my recital at the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands Park in Surrey felt like a complete experiment.

You won't have seen much of magisterial Russian pianist Dmitri Alexeev recently, unless you happen to be a student at the Royal College of Music, where he is Professor of Advanced Piano Studies (they were out in force last night, cheering enough to elicit five encores). His guest appearances at various commemorative concerts, chiefly his towering interpretation of Prokofiev's Sixth Sonata, remain carved in the mind, but this is the first time I've heard him give a full recital.

Such introspective subtlety might be mistaken for reticence. But from the rare instances when the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes lets rip - and they're never forced - you know he's wielding his palette with both skill and intuition, waiting for the big moment to make its proper mark. Flyaway passages in Chopin which in other hands bubble like pure champagne flow like pure spring water; the source is everything.

What pianist wouldn't long to lay fingers on keyboards impregnated, as Roman Rabinovich put it in his introduction yesterday afternoon, with the DNAs of Haydn and Chopin?

If individual greatness is to be found in the way an artist begins and ends a phrase, or finds magical transitions both within and between pieces, then Pavel Kolesnikov is already up there with the top pianists. Listeners tuning in midway through the peaks of his lunchtime Prom – the great Chopin Fantaisie or the Fourth Scherzo – might have thought they were listening to an old master, while what we saw was a modest 28-year-old who looks much younger, but who moves with total assurance and absence of flash. His performance of Tchaikovsky's massive Second Piano Concerto with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland was one of the highlights of last year's Proms; this took us even further in a Chopin odyssey intelligently planned and ineffably well-executed.

Kolesnikov programmed his recital in the shape of a giant Chopin butterfly with two iridescent wings of consecutively played miniature masterpieces leading to bigger numbers and the great Op. 49 Fantaisie as the central body. Its imaginative genius for connection is something I well remember in a Chopin recital by his great mentor, Elisabeth Leonskaja, each of her halves played without applause between pieces; Kolesnikov already has a similar balance between Russian orchestral pianism and the capacity for sudden flight. The concert began with spaciousness in the A flat major Waltz, but no repeat is ever the same in this pianist’s hands, and nothing stays solid for long. Extremes were licensed in the C sharp minor Waltz, beautifully connected to the Fantasie-Impromptu in the same key. Kolesnikov never rushes: even his most headlong brilliance comes up for air in well-placed "breaths".

Five of the amazing Mazurkas, a selection of which Kolesnikov has recorded, showed Chopin’s infinite variety on the most intimate scale: playful in the major-key specimens, from the charm of the composer’s youth to the contrast of the rustic-rollicking C major, Op. 56 No. 2 with the sophisticated A flat major, Op. 50 No. 2; and introspective in the minor, supremely so in an intensely chromatic swansong (Op. 68 No. 4). Kolesnikov had even chosen a brighter action to his Yamaha plano for the third part of his programme, necessitating a keyboard change by four technicians while he chatted sensibly with Petroc Trelawny; like Richter, he never makes the instrument produce the brittle clarity for which it can be notorious.

Those mazurka rhythms made an immediate connection with the start of the E major Scherzo (Chopin's manuscript pictured above), a paradigm of Kolesnikov’s sleight-of-hand between the well-weighted and the ethereal. And the Fantaisie showed his integrity in large-scale thinking, feeling very much like a final work – though in fact it was composed eight years before Chopin’s untimely death – in its search for a peace found in the very moving benediction before the still-questioning final bars.

The bright encore was the Grande Valse Brillante, scaled down at first to intimacy but growing wings like everything else in the programme. The BBC’s Young Generation Artists, including Kolesnikov among their number, are no chrysalids when they make their first radio appearances, but when they take off into the big wide world like Francesco Piemontesi and his equally thoughtful confrère whom we heard here with such unremitting pleasure, the choice is fully vindicated. Besides, anyone who relishes the risk-taking of Amy Winehouse, stands in the Arena for the Proms late-nighter of Rachmaninov's Vespers, and collects old perfumes, is fine by me.

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Next page: watch Kolesnikov play Chopin's Mazurka in A minor, Op. 68 No. 2