Now that Martha Argerich has all but abandoned the recording studio (and the solo recital platform) for chamber projects with her friends and protégés, we must be grateful for the alacrity with which she allows EMI to place their microphones before her in concert. I’ve yet to visit the annual Progetto Martha Argerich in Lugano but, if all the music-making there is as concentrated and intense as it appears on this collection from last year’s gathering, it must be a riveting experience from start to finish.

The compilations that emerge annually from these projects generally mix the familiar with the novel, as well as offering Argerich a chance to revisit her party pieces (in this case an excitable Ravel G major – her 11th on record, according to an online discography) and to jam with friends old and new. Thus she offers scintillating backing for Renaud Capuçon in Beethoven’s G major Sonata and for his brother Gautier in a compelling Schumann Fantasiestücke, and becomes a provocative co-conspirator not only with Cristina Marton in the grandest of Mozart’s piano duets but also with Sergio Tiempo in a suitably unsettling La valse. With Lilya Zilberstein she makes Liszt’s riotous Concerto pathétique sound like film music – even more so than the real thing in the form of a suite from Shostakovich’s delicious Cheryomushki, laid out for three pianos by Carlo Maria Griguoli. She sits out items such as piano trios by Haydn and Rachmaninov, letting the limelight fall on her young charges. These may or may not be likely to become library choices for this repertoire but to invite comparisons is hardly the point: what is palpable in these Lugano CD grab-bags is the festival atmosphere and the intensity of chamber music-making at such a high level.

The rarity in this set is the Piano Quintet by the very short-lived Pole Juliusz Zare˛bski (1854-85). His finest work, according to The New Grove, the obvious comparisons are perhaps with the sinewy motivicism of Brahms (with whose own Piano Quintet the work coincidentally shares an opus number) or the Slavic accent of Dvo∑ák. If it doesn’t quite maintain the knotty insistency of the former or the instant melodic memorability of the latter, it displays a powerful compositional talent and a keen ear for sonorities. A more than useful addition to the repertoire for this combination, it should find many friends when presented with such exalted advocacy as here.