Fortunately for the piano world, Philipp Lynov chose a life in music over a career in chemistry. The 26 year-old Russian started taking piano lessons from the age of six, winning a place at the famed Moscow Conservatory just eight years later. The past six years have seen Lynov stretch his competition muscles, with major victories in China and Japan after his first international triumph at the 2019 International Paderewski Competition in Poland. Now at the Cliburn, Lynov is keen not to be distracted by the pressure of the competition environment. “For me, it’s most important to enjoy the continuous process of music making and communicating through the music I play,” he tells Apple Music Classical. Here, Lynov seems to be on similarly winning form, his progress to the Cliburn final paved with astonishingly personal performances including, in the early rounds, filigree, energy-driven Bach and boldly passionate Schumann. Lynov opens his impressive semifinal recital with a shimmering, dancing account of Ravel’s impressionistic Miroirs, a work as challenging for its musical complexity as for its technical demands. As he tells Apple Music Classical, the piece is “full of delicate colors and impressionistic nuance.” From the start, Lynov’s performance brings these colors to the surface, a free-flowing “Noctuelles” (“Night Moths”) displaying an instinctive grasp of Ravel’s mercurial voice-leading. In the fourth movement, “Alborado del Gracioso” (“The Jester’s Aubade”), Lynov’s dispatches Ravel’s rapidly repeating notes with seemingly effortless style and grace. Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 8, the last of the composer’s three “war” sonatas, is, says Lynov, “intense, introspective, and emotionally vast.” He digs appropriately deep in the opening movement with playing of smouldering heat, an “Andante” that sings Prokofiev’s bittersweet melody with aching beauty, and a valiant, daring assault on the hair-raising final bars of the sardonic “Vivace.”