LAZAR BERMAN was one of the last unabashed exponents of the Romantic tradition of Russian pianism. A bear of a man with a mane of chestnut hair and a ginger beard, he was once aptly described as looking “like a character actor in a Chekhov play”. He had the astounding technique instilled by rigorous musical training from infancy that was perhaps one of the few unqualified goods of the Soviet system, but he placed his virtuosity always at the service of the music he played.

At the heart of his restricted repertoire were the great Romantic works that gave free rein to his astonishingly fast fingers and dazzling dynamic range. But expression for him was all. “If I don’t feel for the music,” he said, “I don’t play it.”

It was an approach that drew accusations of bluster from more classically-minded critics, but at his best, as an exhilarating performer of the music he loved, Berman was unsurpassed.

Lazar Naumovich Berman was born in 1930 in Leningrad. His mother, Anna Markhover, had trained as a pianist but gave up her career to nurture the prodigious talents of her son. She began to teach him the piano when he was 2, and he was studying at the Leningrad Conservatory within a year. At 3½ he entered his first piano competition. At 7 he made a private recording of a Mozart sonata and played in a national showcase concert for young musicians.

In 1939 the family moved to Moscow, where Berman began studies first at the Central Children’s Music School and then at the conservatory, with Alexander Goldenweiser, who had been a friend of Tolstoy and a classmate of Rachmaninov and Scriabin. He also took the opportunity to learn from other great exemplars of the Russian school — Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Sofronitzky, Heinrich Neuhaus and Maria Yudina.

Berman made his professional debut at the age of 10, playing Mozart’s concerto no 25 in C, K503, with the Moscow Philharmonic. Wartime life was hard, but his mother dressed him in a long coat and made him fingerless gloves, so that even in winter he could practise every day. In these years, he recalled, he “absorbed every composer for the piano”. At 12 he played Grieg with the Bolshoi orchestra. He was heard for the first time by unsuspecting listeners in Britain when he participated in a wartime exchange broadcast between Soviet Radio and the BBC.

In the 1950s he began to make his mark in competitions both behind the Iron Curtain and in the West. By the middle of the decade he was already much admired, with no less a pianist than Emil Gilels describing him as “the phenomenon of the musical world”.

After winning prizes in 1956 at the Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels and the Franz Liszt competition in Budapest, Berman was allowed by the Soviet authorities to embark on a European tour that would bring him international acclaim. It included an appearance at the Royal Festival Hall in March 1958, playing Beethoven, Prokofiev and Liszt.

At the end of the tour, however, perhaps because he had taken a French wife, Berman was confined to the Soviet Union for more than 15 years. Nevertheless, his reputation in the West continued to grow, consolidated by the occasional report from visting critics and by recordings on the Melodiya label, beginning with a visceral account of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies in 1959.

By the time Berman was allowed to play in the West again, from 1976, expectations had been raised to a perhaps unhealthy degree. Admirers such as The New York Times’s Harold C. Schonberg, who after seeing Berman in Moscow in 1961 had said he had 20 fingers and breathed fire, were delighted to encounter once more “a real, true blue Romantic, one who understands the conventions and has the ability to put them into effect”.

Many listeners, perhaps most, shared that enthusiasm. Berman became an international star. He appeared with the great orchestras and conductors of the day, his fame based not least on the powerful recordings he made at this time of Tchaikovsky’s first concerto, with von Karajan, and Rachmaninov’s third with Bernstein.

But there were dissenting voices, too. Joan Chissell, reviewing Berman’s return to London for The Times in 1976, was impressed by his extraordinary ability “to combine speed with strength”, but noted a worrying tendency to let forte become fortissimo and “to pull out all the stops rather too often”.

Whatever his merits, no sooner had Berman found fame in the West than he disappeared once more. In 1980 banned American books were found in his luggage and he fell from grace, the authorities rarely allowing him out of the Soviet Union in the decade that followed.

He left the USSR finally in 1990, settling eventually in Italy, where he took citizenship in 1994. He was a dedicated teacher, and he developed a perhaps surprising subtle talent for chamber music, playing duets with his violinist son Pavel.

He was three times married.

Lazar Berman, pianist, was born on February 26, 1930. He died on February 6, 2005, aged 74.