Janina Fialkowska previously impressed me with her accounts of Schubert’s Sonatas D664 and 894. Her reading of the E flat major Sonata, D568, is no less compelling, with an unerring sense of architecture and a responsiveness to Schubert’s innately unstable moods. Hers is a quiet kind of pianism that doesn’t shout ‘look at me’ yet yields more rewards than many more interventionist players. The slow movement, for instance, has less rhetorical freedom than Barenboim’s but to these ears is all the more effective for it, while her outburst at 2'20" (tr 2) has a real vehemence to it, though no one finds as much desolation in this Andante as Uchida. ‘Naturalness’ is the word that comes to mind time and again, and the third movement is a good demonstration of this quality, while Fialkowska’s finale has an apt whimsicality compared to which Barenboim sounds somewhat po-faced. Her relatively swift tempo and omission of the repeat (unlike Barenboim and Uchida) also emphasise the fleeting quality of this movement.

It’s a similar story with the D935 Impromptus. Others may make more of the contrast between spiky rhetoric and the assuaging response at the outset of the first, but what Fialkowska delights in is a clarity of narrative. She’s also particularly engaging in the more inward moments, not least the No 1’s hand-crossing duet against the left hand’s murmuring accompaniment – though Lupu is even more rapt here. In No 2, which she launches at an ideally lilting pace, she conveys a kind of symphonic breadth that belies its dimensions, and the inner section rises to a tumultuous pitch.

In the theme that launches the variations of the third, Fialkowska finds a simplicity compared to which Uchida can sound just a touch fey, and she doesn’t short-change on the anguish of the minor-key third variation but nor is she tempted to exaggerate. Some find a more unhinged aspect to the edgy Fourth Impromptu (Fischer and Uchida, for instance) but once again Fialkowska lets the music speak for itself, and that brings its own rewards.