Etsuko Hirose has appeared a few times in these pages over the past five years, most recently her ‘Sheherazade’ disc featuring her own arrangement of Rimsky’s eponymous work and Bortkiewicz’s Thousand and One Nights ballet suite (1/25). The appearance of this four-disc set is something of a surprise. It features the four albums she made between 2003 and 2007 for the Japanese label Denon which, mysteriously, were only ever released in Japan. Their reissue is entirely down to the enthusiasm of Danacord’s CEO Jesper Buhl, whose admiration for Hirose’s playing finally convinced Denon that they should be released for the international market. Pianophiles will be grateful to him.

If you wanted to gift someone an introduction to (or representative illustration of) the virtuoso piano music of the 19th and early 20th centuries, then this would be an ideal ‘starter pack’. To hear this type of music at its best you need a musician with the right temperament and innate stylistic understanding who is also a pianist with the chops to negotiate the cascades of notes and huge technical demands. Hirose, who won the first Martha Argerich International Piano Competition in 1999, meets these criteria and then some.

Each of the four discs is loosely dedicated to a different theme. Among the highlights of disc 1 (‘Chaconne’), named for the famous Bach-Busoni Chaconne, are robust performances of four Schubert-Liszt songs and the Gounod-Liszt Faust Waltz transcription, in which Hirose makes the most of the Steinway’s brilliant upper register. Her disc also has César Franck’s Prélude, fugue et variation for organ in the rarely heard version by Jörg Demus rather than the better-known one by Harold Bauer.

Disc 2 (‘La valse’) from 2004 benefits from the slightly less swimmy acoustic of the Kasakenko Bunka Hall, Gunma, and opens with a fine account of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance in Tausig’s arrangement, a work the booklet writer seems to think originated as an orchestral piece, not as a piano solo. There are scintillating performances of Ravel’s La valse and Stravinsky’s Trois Mouvements de Pétrouchka in the solo versions by their respective composers. Best of all – despite a leaden Sugar Plum Fairy (too much Christmas pud?) – is Pletnev’s concert suite from The Nutcracker. The way in which Hirose voices the Russian Dance is as close as the piano can get to sounding like a flute in dialogue with pizzicato strings. The final Pas de deux is a scintillating display of grand, sweeping bravura. Glorious.

Disc 3 (‘Fantasies’) is more of a mixed bag, starting with a matter-of-fact Mozart D minor Fantasia, all the better for not being over-indulged. I did not care quite so much for Schumann’s great C major Fantasie which follows. I have heard, let’s say, less strident renditions, though the treacherous final page of the march is well-handled. Liszt’s Dante Sonata is the least successful performance of the set. Too often tension evaporates with exaggerated expression and meaningful pauses, and leading voices are dominated by secondary material. The best of this 2006 recording is all five of Rachmaninov’s Morceaux de fantaisie, Op 3, the second of which may just be familiar to you …

Chopin and Alkan make up disc 4 (‘Le vent’), recorded in 2007. Its title is borrowed from the second work here, Alkan’s once-popular showpiece, the ne plus ultra of chromatic scale workouts – not, it must be said, one of Alkan’s most profound utterances but still likely to raise an incredulous eyebrow. ‘Le vent’ is preceded by Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ Sonata, which ends, it will be remembered, with ‘the wind howling around the gravestones’ (Anton Rubinstein). The penultimate study of Chopin’s 12 Études, Op 25, is nicknamed ‘Winter Wind’ (though not by the composer). The sonata and studies are very well played, bold and forthright with imaginative insights and many individual touches. Sometimes Hirose over-interprets (Op 25 No 9), a tendency that creeps into the final offering, Alkan’s Le festin d’Ésope, where occasionally she tries to prettify the torrents of notes that in the hands of, say, Marc-André Hamelin simply take your breath away. Still, an impressive whirlwind with which to end.