This fifth and final release of Cortot’s 78rpm Chopin recordings is surely the jewel in the crown. Here, the 1929 rather than the more familiar 1933 set of the Ballades blazes with a passion, brilliance and poetic audacity that set the pulses racing and the mind reeling. Here is a great artist who seized the opportunity to achieve ever greater heights of eloquence and rhetorical verve. Superbly restored by Mark Obert-Thorn, every performance is charged with a heady and consuming poetry that confirms Daniel Barenboim’s claim that “Cortot discovered the opium in Chopin”. Take the First Ballade’s opening, where Cortot is every inch the bardic poet, free, rhapsodic and inimitable; or hear him in the Presto con fuoco storms of the Second Ballade, where he plays as if pursued by the furies of hell.

Again, even when inaccuracies fly in all directions in the heat of the chase, no other pianist has approached the Third Ballade’s central C sharp minor turbulence with such daring or recreative force. Cortot was never one to hold back in the interests of decorum and in the Fourth Ballade he stretches the parameters of Chopin’s poetry to the very edge, his playing close to being consumed in its own ecstasy.

His selection of Nocturnes (sadly his projected Chopin survey was never completed) pulse with the same alluring quality, suggesting the reverse of Rubinstein’s more patrician elegance (amazingly the recordings of the two greatest Chopin pianists are available at Naxos’s bargain price). True, for today’s more antiseptic and “tasteful” practitioners such artistic conviction and originality will seem extravagant or even camp, a “theatricalisation of experience” in Susan Sontag’s classic definition. Yet there is surely no living pianist who could or would attempt to emulate such heart-stopping poetry. Maria Callas herself would have been among the first to pay tribute to Cortot’s cantabile, an unequalled “singing” at the piano.

There are two performances of the early E flat Nocturne (the 1949 performance, like too many good things, previously only available in Japan) and it only remains for me, ever greedy for greatness, to hope that Naxos will now complement their generosity with Moiseiwitsch’s scarcely less ardent and mercurial Chopin.