Janina Fialkowska continues her Chopin odyssey with a subtle and elusive challenge. The 55 Mazurkas (extended from what was once considered 52) are Chopin’s confessional diary: joyous, anguished, luxuriant, austere, testy and conciliatory, they are at the very heart of Chopin’s genius. The 27 Etudes may be an intimidating lexicon of technique (‘boy, did they ever give me grief’ – the American pianist Ruth Laredo) but the Mazurkas are sufficiently rooted and ethnic that they can become inaccessible to all but the finest musicians.

Fialkowska, making her courageous return after serious illness, is Canadian but, as her name declares, of Polish origin. And Rubinstein, her longtime mentor, would have been the first to admire her unfailing musical honesty, her refreshing alternative to self-conscious sophistication. Sensitive to the mazurka’s 16th-century peasant origins – the reverse of the polonaises, court and regal dances – she is no less aware of Chopin’s alchemy, his transformation of the rudimentary into ‘something rich and strange’. She captures ‘the wood-note wild’ of Op 6 No 3, the hiccuping burst into radiant dance elaboration in Op 41 No 3, and is sufficiently resourceful in Op 37 No 1 (the one Michelangeli, when caught in one of his rare forthcoming moods, played as an encore) to resolve its repetitions. She relishes the baleful poetry of Op 30 No 4; and if she is more emphatic than resilient in Op 33 No 2 (its popularity acquired via Les Sylphides), she is moving in the F minor and valedictory Mazurka – music, as she so hauntingly puts it, full of ‘echoes of a Poland lost in time, its mood of deathly exhaustion’.

You won’t hear Horowitz’s wicked necromancy in his selection of the Mazurkas, or Argerich’s magical fluidity in the Op 59 set. Above all, Rubinstein eclipses everyone in his 1938 39 set on Naxos, his patrician elegance a near-impossible act to follow. I should add for good measure that my own dream Mazurka performance is again from Rubinstein. This is of Op 56 No 3 in C minor, mercifully immortalised by BBC Legends. In the meantime, for a modern recording, you will find an impressive blend of sense and sensibility from Fialkowska, who is well recorded and presented.