Suitably subtitled “Unquiet Traveller”, this DVD is a dazzling portrait of a pianist rapidly acquiring cult status. For many he is the most original and charismatic pianist of his generation, and like all true artists his life is a confusion of paradoxes. For Anderszewski, talking about music is a betrayal, a form of sacrilege evoking William Blake’s “Never seek to tell thy love; love which never can be told”.

Yet how he talks! Told he is an uncompromising pianist, he lives in fear of compromise, dreading concerto performances where responsibility is divided. Solo recitals are no less of a nightmare, a cruel form of exposure, recordings even more so as you strive for perfection, for an ever-elusive ideal. Of Hungarian-Polish birth, his nature veers from elation to depression, joy but also fear of the exigencies of a concert pianist’s career. He speaks movingly of his greatest loves, of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Szymanowski and, most of all, Mozart. For him hearing Mozart’s Requiem at the Church of the Holy Cross in his beloved Warsaw was his first great inspiration and a reminder that Warsaw was raped and murdered first by the Nazis and then by the Russians. He stares masochistically at a photo album of old Warsaw, a rich and cosmopolitan city now standardised with the Chopin Airport as an example of unspeakable vulgarity. This leads to a stream-of-consciousness response to Chopin and of how his ultra-Polish soul comes clothed in a perfectly tailored suit. For him much of the Barcarolle is sufficiently rapturous to evoke a drunken gondolier, while the Third Ballade makes you think of young girls in white waking the streets of Paris. The C sharp minor Waltz, on the other hand, is “noble”.

All this and so much more is filmed on a train as Anderszewski journeys from city to city, a born nomad now safely in the hands of his train-driver. There are superb examples of Bach (a razor-sharp Gigue from the First Partita), Mozart, Beethoven (the recording sessions for the First Concerto), Chopin, Schumann and Szymanowski, all played and described with a breathless and romantic wish to communicate at a bewildering number of different levels. Like Claudio Arrau he could well exclaim, “when I play I am in ecstasy, that is what I live for”.