Anxious for new blood, DG have turned their sights on the East, though as Alice Sara Ott tells us she is half-German and half-Japanese, never feeling entirely at ease with either homeland. Claiming that this allows her a special empathy with Chopin, a composer torn painfully from his roots, she gives us a performance of the Waltzes as touching, piquant and scintillating as on any modern recording.

Only just out of her teens, she leaves you to marvel at her instinct for Chopin’s poetic ambiguity, his alternating melancholy and exuberance, his ultra-Slavonic hope and despair, her playing backed by the sheen of an immaculate technique and pianism. You will go a long way to hear the A minor Waltz confided with a greater sense of its intimacy or the following F major Waltz given with such contrasting brio and expressive freedom. Her D flat Waltz, Op 64, is sufficiently stylish and elegant to make nonsense of its sobriquet, “Minute” Waltz (an editors’ whim), and she catches the B minor Waltz’s gentle but querulous mood to perfection. Playing from autograph manuscripts, she relishes the more florid harmony and ornamentation of, for example, Nos 8, 9 and 10, and includes all the posthumous Waltzes, ending with the Allegretto in A minor and making it a haunting and touching valediction.

DG’s sound is ideal and their presentation could hardly be more lavish, with no fewer than 20 photographs of their pianist. Ott has already recorded Liszt’s Transcendental and Paganini Etudes and her recorded orchestral debut will be in the Liszt and Tchaikovsky First Concertos.