The British-Turkish pianist Lara Melda first came to prominence as Lara Melda Ömerog˘lu when she won the BBC Young Musician competition in 2010, aged 16. She gave a memorable performance of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No 2 in the final round with Vasily Petrenko and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Since then she has won something of a reputation as a Chopin-player. This recording would seem to endorse that reputation.

I have not always been the biggest fan of the Champs Hill piano sound but here it is warm and ideally focused (the disc is produced, engineered and edited by Patrick Allen), somehow different from the rather clinical, claustrophobic acoustic I associate with this source. From the opening bars of the Op 9 No 1 Nocturne, the sound that Melda produces beguiles the ear with beautifully balanced, long-breathed cantabile phrases, played with no idiosyncratic interventions, and in short capturing the essence of what a nocturne should be.

Groups of nocturnes alternate with the four Ballades which, praise be, are not played in one sequence as though they were composed as a kind of four-movement work. Here, even when No 3 follows on directly from No 2, we can savour the character of each individual Ballade. As in the nocturnes, Melda has an instinctive grasp of structure – a real storyteller – and in the G minor Ballade the way she paces and shapes the glorious E flat theme and its apotheosis in A major is quite masterly (though strangely she underplays its ff return in E flat). The F major Ballade is no less successful, a version to live with, even if Murray Perahia brings a wider tonal palette to a more refined final agitato section. Melda follows the Third Ballade with the C minor Nocturne, Op 48 No 1, surely as much ballade as nocturne. Its opus companion is succeeded by the F minor Ballade, another performance to savour despite an occasional loss of clarity in the frenetic final pages (she is not alone!). All in all, a fine Chopin recital that is a cut above the average.