This is astonishing piano playing and Chopin interpretation that, at its best, fully measures up to the greatness of these pieces. And to their freshness, not least: the Ballades and Scherzos, along with just about all Chopin’s mature work, have been constantly before the public, and Stephen Hough’s accounts of them offer plenty of refreshment to spirit and senses.

It’s not given to many pianists to play them as well as he. I like his dis-tribution of them here, chronological but alternating one of each – which may not make a recital to consume at one go but helps to point up their diversity and individual character, as well as Chopin’s mastery of large forms. Hough is unfailingly thoughtful; there’s not a note that hasn’t been cared for. Just a few of them (Third Ballade, for example) are picked out of the texture and strung together for our delectation in a way that strikes me as otiose, at least when I’m in a sober-sides kind of mood. Here and there (Fourth Ballade) you may be made aware that he has a marvellous left hand; well, come on, why not enjoy it? The surfaces of his presentations are very ‘worked’, more redolent of application, maybe, than of organic growth. But emphatically this is not superficial playing and, heavens, how the performances catch fire.

He inclines to the accepted view that Chopin’s large forms have a ‘plot’ that culminates in a tumult or a whirlwind of activity. My taste in the coda of the Fourth Ballade is for the tempest to be a mite less furious, so that the ear has more time to register what’s going on. The closing pages of No 1, on the other hand, have an exemplary finish and allure. Most distinguished of the Ballades here, to my mind, is No 2, where Hough perceives the invasion of one kind of music by another in all its subtlety and lays out a spellbinding seven-minute drama. This is one of the best accounts I can remember hearing.

He has interesting points to make in the Scherzos, too. Where many a player is content to let recurring sections and paragraphs register simply as the music we heard before, with him they sound different in some degree, affected by what has come in between. I like that very much and warm particularly to the thrust and the inflections of his pacing in Nos 2 and 3. Towards the end of No 4, much of it exquisitely done, I have developed a reservation about the way his rubato masks Chopin’s large-scale rhythmic scheme. Hough is a player who’s always doing something. Sometimes I wish he were doing less. I’ve no doubt, however, that this is an issue out of the ordinary; welcome, too, for being handsomely recorded and produced.