Chopin: Ballade No 2; Mazurkas Op33; etc: Maurizio Pollini

As his last couple of London recitals have demonstrated, Maurizio Pollini is on magisterial form at the moment, and this carefully planned Chopin sequence, grouping together the works of Opp 34 to 36 with Op 38, provides a document of this golden period in his playing career. He has recorded the two major works here, the second Ballade and the B flat minor Sonata before, but both of these are titanic performances, full of perfectly focused power and high-tensile lyricism. He is arguably more effective on these larger canvases than in the miniatures, where his approach can seem like taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and some pianists would certainly bring more intimacy to the four mazurkas of Op 33, and a bit more ingratiating charm to the set of waltzes Op 34. But in the end the sheer aristocratic authority of the playing sweeps all before it. On this kind of form, Pollini has few pianistic peers in the world today.