Immediately following Yundi’s set of the Nocturnes comes Nelson Freire, two artists at the start and autumn of their careers. For Freire the Nocturnes are tirelessly experimental, an opalescent world of shifting moods and colours. Too serious to be overtly glamorous or heart-stopping, his warm-hearted performances eschew a concert-hall brio in favour of intimacy, almost as if played in the privacy of one’s own room. Not that he is immune to those sudden flashes of anger never far from Chopin’s always volatile nature. He is dramatically alive to the startling end to the Field-like B major Nocturne, Op 32 No 1, with its muffled timpani strokes and a sudden menace as chilling as the conclusion to Browning’s poem “In a Gondola”. The posthumous E minor Nocturne, too, which, as the sleeve-notes usefully tell us, is a late rather than early work, emerges pained and drawn, reminding you of Delacroix’s celebrated portrait of Chopin. But overall Freire is at his finest in readings which are pensive and conciliatory. He is truly lento in the G minor Nocturne with its obsessive questioning and religioso conclusion, and time and again he makes you see these works as truly night pieces, music of an “embalmed darkness” (to quote Keats). True, there are moments when a once legendary and impeccable technique stiffens (in the double-note flow of the G major Nocturne), yet this is less than marginal in music-making so personal and reflective.