For his second Delphian Chopin disc, David Wilde offers a determined attack on conventional wisdom. Here is no ‘sick-room talent’ (John Field) or salon dandy concerned about the cut of his trousers but an epic, gnarled and rugged genius shaking his fist at the universe with all the defiance of King Lear (‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’).

Refusing to take anything at face value, his performances scorn a more familiar suave and evasive outlook. He opens with the C sharp minor Nocturne, Op 27, finding ample support for his approach in its gaunt and baleful progression and bringing the dark and menacing rise in the central section to a rhetorical uproar. There is weight rather than facility in the ‘hoof-beats of the Polish Cavalry’ (Liszt) at the heart of the A flat Polonaise, heroic testimony, indeed, to Chopin’s patriotic fervour. Wilde stretches his points in the Second Sonata’s death-haunted pages. There are thunderous bass reinforcements and a near-quadruple fortissimo at the return of the principal theme in the Funeral March (echoing a Romantic tradition, most notably from Rachmaninov). Again, there is nothing sotto voce about the phantom finale but a gusty chasing of melodic fragments during its nightmarish course. For the D flat (‘Raindrop’) Prelude Wilde adopts a more natural, less single-mindedly different line, though there are thunderclaps aplenty in the central section’s downpour. In the E flat Nocturne, Op 9, on the other hand, his rubato tugs heavily against a more natural impetus, something that is nonetheless part and parcel of his uncompromising approach.

In his long and deeply personal essay he scorns all easy facility, using the word ‘gothic’ most aptly in relation to the B flat minor Sonata. Some may accuse him of assault and battery but others will surely pause to think again about Chopin’s stature. Delphian’s sound is crystal-clear and beyond reproach.