There is a series of piano concerts at St. John the Evangelist Church on Iffley Road which is being taken, possibly, slightly for granted. For if you read the résumés of the musicians, they are indeed ‘world class’; touring the great concert halls of the globe, and strangely, in the SJE Arts centre, buried in this late gothic revivalist church. The helpful staff usher us to seats which are fairly close, but not close enough to really get the full force of these pieces. For the pianist Alexei Volodin is giving the keyboard of his Steinway a hammering of Russian Modernist composers, and doing it well.

Having before now attended only a few classical concerts (I’m the right age to start; there is a reason why many venues give out seats for a fiver to anyone under 35 - a wholly unrepresented group in classical music venues) I find the acoustics in the church slightly dispersive, and echoey - but the lack of intimacy doesn’t detract from the fact that he really plays his Steinway extremely well.

Does Russian high culture leave you cold? I will continue the meteorological theme if you bear with me. As I told my 10-year-old sitting next to me, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov have got be the perfect antidote to an afternoon spent watching ‘Dog Academy’ on Netflix.

Volodin starts with a series of works by Medtner - whom I have to confess to not having heard of before this evening. The first movement, Op. 20-1 B-flat minor, leaves me feeling like I’m in St Petersburg in a snowstorm. Well, there was a flurry in Marston early this morning, so maybe I’m projecting my early-morning impressions. But there is a kind of downbeat dexterity and energy that we’re finding distinctly wintery. As we move through the works by Medtner, by the 4th or 5th, I realise he’s starting to reach summer, and then we get Prokofiev.

By this point, though, Volodin is starting to look drained - I keep wondering whether the Russians have a word for this, the type of emotional exhaustion exhibited or demanded by playing its famous composers. And it’s getting heavier. I’m losing the seasons and feel like I’ve just waded through a pile of pierozki and I’m waiting for the vodka chaser.

By the time we get to the last quarter - and 30 minutes or so of Rachmaninov - I reflect on what I’d heard earlier on Radio 4 about a retailer in Moscow buying the building that was formerly used as Stalin’s execution chamber - and using it to sell perfume! Rachmaninov's Piano Sonata No.1 in D minor, op.28 scales lows and moderate highs at phenomenal speed and dramatic intensity. Like Russia itself, these pieces are not easy to absorb but are certainly high relief from the mediocrity of our modern life.

Perhaps the name of Medtner scares audiences a little - certainly there was a slightly disappointing audience this evening for Alexei Volodin’s storming performance of early 20th-C Russian piano pieces at SJE Arts in East Oxford, which also included Rachmaninov and Prokofiev sonatas. He is touring this challenging programme around Europe at the minute, and delivers a hugely confident recital which manages simultaneously to be fiercely passionate and brilliantly accurate.

The Medtner consisted of a series of his ‘Folk Tales’, depictions of stories which might have been familiar to his Russian audiences and a form to which he kept returning throughout his life – one to which he brought increasing maturity, and eventually greater simplicity. Many of these were sharp-edged and dissonant; some had elements of lyricism and contemplation. All were played with consummate skill and a deep understanding of the material.

The second half of the concert presented the Rachmaninov Piano Sonata no.1, which engaged the audience in an extraordinary way - I’m not sure I have ever heard such rapt and breathless stillness between movements at any concert, and this seemed to express something about the respect in the room for the performer, and an anticipation for the journey we were being taken on.

That said, the audience though not large, made a lot of appreciative noise at the end of the programme, and also for the two encores to which we were treated.

Such music requires a great deal of the instrument as well as the performer, and the programme was presented very effectively on what is perhaps one of the best Steinway pianos in any Oxford venue, which sang beautifully.

Enthusiasts for piano performance need to be aware of the range of talent appearing at SJE’s seventh international piano season, which will be running until June this year – it would be nice to see bigger audiences henceforth for what looks like an important concert series.