Jonathan Plowright shines a powerful light on Paderewski. Gone is the purveyor of salon trifles and charmers (his Minuet in G is ever present in “those you love” anthologies), his very public charisma as both pianist and politician replaced by serious ambitions as a composer. The Sonata is more than 34 minutes in length – the finale’s whirlwind progress interrupted with a fugal development – while both sets of Variations end with fugues clearly inspired by Brahms’s Handel Variations. And it is here in particular that you sense Paderewski’s wish to doff his hat to academe and to write music of a substance that would outlive his more transient celebrity as a performer. The ghosts of many composers haunt his turbulent and sometimes dour pages (Brahms, Liszt, Schumann and, in Var 5 from his Op 11 Variations, his compatriot Szymanowski’s early Op 3 Variations) suggesting his difficulty in finding a distinctive and original voice. Paderewski’s treatment of his material may have all the virtuoso intricacy expected from a master pianist, but the ideas (the principal octave theme from the Sonata’s first movement, for example) are rarely satisfying.

However, in Jonathan Plowright you have a pianist clearly in love with every bar of Paderewski’s romantic rhetoric and it would be hard to imagine playing of greater sympathy or a more intimidating visceral strength and cogency. A pianist who excels in music’s darker undercurrents and declamations, he clears every daunting hurdle with awe-inspiring ease, making a formidable case for one of music’s neglected byways. Finely presented and recorded, this is a valuable and surprising issue.