Here is a rare chance to savour all of Chopin’s piano sonatas played on contemporary instruments by his two preferred makers, Pleyel (1848) and Erard (1849). Helped by the shorter decay of the notes, textural details often obscured by modern instruments emerge, while utterly different tone colours from those we’re used to throw fresh light on the music. I doubt if even pianophiles who would willingly wait a few years before listening yet again to such familiar scores will be anything less than fascinated by the results.

Even Howard Shelley, though, cannot rescue the first movement of the student Op 4 from seeming as interminable as usual, but perhaps it is hearing the remaining three, also in their period guise, that makes one regard them afresh with something close to affection. In the Second Sonata’s first movement, played with the doppio movimento rather than grave repeat (surely the only sensible option), the left-hand quavers form a counterpoint rather than mere accompaniment; in bars 11 and 12 of the slow movement Shelley miraculously grades the sforzando/diminuendo marking as if he had a swell pedal. Such fine points draw the listener in: one waits with bated breath for the rest of the story. Shelley turns to the Pleyel for only the Scherzo and Presto movements.

The Third Sonata’s first movement is given without a repeat but it is once again the slow movement, in my view, from which the music benefits most from the Erard’s tonal palette. An amiable booklet completes this engrossing release from The Frederyk Chopin Institute, Warsaw.