For her second Chopin album, Janina Fialkowska once again offers a carefully chosen miscellany rather than a more conventional chronology. And, to an even greater extent than before, her performances blaze and challenge with a potent and highly individual sense of drama. Her curtain-raiser, the E flat minor Polonaise, at once gives the lie to quaint notions of Chopin as a salon figure. Bold and portentous, it is almost as if the Grim Reaper himself had spoken, with parameters stretched far beyond conventional wisdom, a far cry indeed from, say, Pollini’s daunting austerity.

For Fialkowska, Chopin can take on something of the dark-hued austerity of late Liszt and when you hear her unleash such a formidable tempest of sound in the presto storms of the Second Ballade, you seem to see Delacroix’s pained and tortured portrait of the composer. Her F minor Fantaisie is of a grandeur rarely met with on disc, her Second Scherzo, broadly paced, of a quasi-symphonic breadth and weight. Even in the Op 64 A flat Waltz, you sense an underlying unrest, and if Fialkowska sometimes bears down heavily on some of Chopin’s more intimate and fragrant utterances (the Op 55 Nocturne’s elegant and multi-directional tracery), there is never any doubting her strength of purpose. All this is a striking advance on earlier recordings, with their more conventional notion of interpretation, and to crown it all Fialkowska has been superbly recorded.