Around 90 minutes' drive from Birmingham, easily found a few miles beyond the end of the M50, Wyastone Leys is a beautiful country estate set beside the river Wye in the rolling Monmouthsire countryside.

And it boasts a wonderful concert-hall with an exemplary acoustic.

Seating 550, the hall was originally created as the recording home for Nimbus Records (the famous single microphone dangles in permanent pride), but now is also the home for an enterprising summer concert series, complete with Glyndebourne-style picnic areas and restaurant catering.

Next year BBC Radio 3 will be taking four of Wyastone's events for broadcast, but this year the enthusiastic audiences have already enjoyed performances from Julian Lloyd Webber and the English String Orchestra, English Touring Opera, David Owen Norris and others.

And Friday brought Grigory Sokolov, one of the world's biggest pianistic names, to the venue, with a rich and absorbing programme of Schubert and Chopin.

This quiet, shy giant of a genius enraptured a packed house after a delayed start with a commanding yet intimate account of the A major Sonata Schubert composed within a few weeks of his early death.

This huge work encompasses a range of textures and colours, and Sokolov drew us magisterially into them all. Bass lines underpinned glittering treble utterances with import and inevitability, the vast range of almost symphonic (and, in the andantino, operatic) contrasts was integrated seamlessly, and the structure was brilliantly framed by an opening and conclusion more clangorous than anything in between.

A lengthy Chopin sequence, given virtually without a break, found Sokolov alert to both dancing figurations and introspective poetic musings. And a neatly turned Bach final encore proved the perfect sorbet after such richness.

Christopher Morley