Chopin’s Waltzes are sophisticated idealisations of a popular form. Their deliberate artificiality and conversational brio are of another age, presenting an elusive challenge to contemporary pianists born in more democratic, less aristocratic times. And it is in this sense that Laure Favre-Kahn, a French pianist who includes Bruno Rigutto among her teachers, falls short in too many respects.

Her performances burst with a youthful bravura that easily topples into exaggeration. Her expressive underlining in the A minor No 3 is a far cry from many celebrated pianists’ patrician sang-froid, and in the Waltz in A flat, with its teasing mix of duple and triple time, her rubato is more affected than stylish. A steadier pulse would have been welcome in the elegiac C sharp minor waltz, No 7, and the rollicking G flat No 11 is all fits and starts, quite without underpinning rhythmic stability.

Nonetheless, Favre-Kahn is infectiously high-spirited in No 2, Op 34 No 1 in A flat, and warmly committed to the wistful D flat No 13, the one where Chopin alerted his lover of the moment to a particular passage, saying ‘only you will know what this means’. There is a blaze of excitement in No 1, greeted with tumultuous applause, and the posthumous A minor Waltz, No 19, is a poetic after-thought.