Pollini's traversal of Chopin's 19 Nocturnes (he leaves out the pair of posthumous ones) is one of his finest recordings in years. His long-lined yet detailed performances are comparable to the very different ones that have long stood at the pinnacle of recorded sets. Not as serene as Artur Rubinstein's, not as philosophical as Claudio Arrau's, nor as warm as Ivan Moravec's, Pollini's interpretations have their own allure. One is the way he shapes the melodies with a natural flow enhanced by his tonal beauty, less lean and streamlined than his usual way with Romantic music.

Daniil Trifonov is a Russian pianist who won one of the prizes at the 2010 International Chopin Competition when he was only 19. This CD was recorded back then. He has had a burgeoning career since then and he has recorded two previously released Chopin CDs: Daniil Trifonov Plays Frederic Chopin &Mazurkas Op 56 / Nocturne in B Major to general praise.

The required calling card of any pianist-composer in the 1820s and '30s was a virtuosic piano piece accompanied by an orchestra. When the 21-year-old Chopin arrived in Paris in the fall of 1831, he had several such compositions under his arm, including the Concerto in E Minor (which, although the first of his two concertos to be published, was composed after the Concerto in F Minor) and the already heralded Variations (which had inspired Robert Schumann to remark, "Hats off, gentlemen–a genius.").

Leopold Godowsky's "transcriptions" of Chopin's etudes are notorious for being technically difficult beyond the originals and, therefore, are rarely played, much less recorded, unless the pianist is a super-virtuoso like Marc-André Hamelin. Boris Berezovsky is another who has proven himself up to the task of successfully performing the fiendish studies.

The Polish pianist Halina Czerny-Stefanska (1922 - 1982) enjoyed a more substantial reputation among piano buffs than among music-lovers in general until she was unexpectedly shot to prominence by a mistake that got her talked about all around the world. In the early 1950s she had performed the First Concerto of Chopin under Vaclav Smetacek in a recording issued by the Czech label Supraphon; when EMI reissued the performance in 1965 it was attributed to Dinu Lipatti, the Romanian pianist whose premature death in 1950 robbed classical music of one of its brightest stars.

France's Naïve label has heavily promoted the career of the young pianist Lise de la Salle, who was 22 when this recording was made. Her fashion-spread good looks fit with Naïve's design concepts, and she has the ability to deliver the spontaneous, unorthodox performances the label favors. How does she fare in a field extremely crowded with Chopin recitals? Her performances certainly aren't derivative of anyone else, and this live recording from the Semperoper in Dresden (you get a one-minute track of just applause at the end) has a good deal of attention-getting flair. The standout feature of de la Salle's performance, in the four ballades at least, is her orientation toward slow tempos, inventively deployed.

Daniil Trifonov, winner of the 2011 International Tchaikovsky Competition, is probably the world's most exciting young pianist. On his first Mariinsky recording, he joins Valery Gergiev for a scintillating performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No 1. Trifonov also presents a selection of recital repertoire including music by Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Liszt transcriptions of Schubert and Schumann lieder. In 2011, Trifonov gave his debut with the London Symphony Orchestra and has since performed with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Mariinsky Orchestra, as well as touring throughout the USA, Europe and the Far East. In the coming season he will make debuts with the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony and Chicago Symphony orchestras, as well as performing recitals at Salle Pleyel, Carnegie Hall, Suntory Hall and Wigmore Hall.

Chopin, Piano Concertos No. 1 and 2, performed by pianist Sa Chen and the Gulbenkian Orchestra Lisbon, Lawrence Foster, conductor (Pentatone Classics). Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra followers will remember Sa Chen from a year ago. In October 2007, she joined the orchestra for an unusual work, a piano concerto by Clara Schumann. Chen looks about 12 on her album cover here, but she's 29. She is a promising pianist.

Created for legendary ballerina Marcia Haydée, one of the great dance actresses of her generation, John Neumeier's Lady of the Camellias is a full-length ballet masterpiece. Like the Garbo film Camille and Verdi's La Traviata, it is based on Dumas's autobiographical novel about how, at the age of 20, he fell in love with a beautiful but doomed demi-mondaine. This stunning 1987 film is "a stroke of good fortune for the cinema and a triumph for Neumeier's ballet".

For her tenth Deutsche Grammophon release, pianist Alice Sara Ott returns to the music of Frédéric Chopin. She approaches Chopin’s 24 Préludes op. 28 from a fresh perspective, finding a personal thread that parallels the music’s dramatic arc and wide-ranging moods. The pianist frames the Préludes within a contemporary context by interspersing them with seven works by 20th- and 21st-century composers.

Maria João Pires “shapes and colours every phrase, and with immaculate taste, and she makes sure the phrases end as eloquently as they begin,” wrote Gramophone in 1974. “She conveys not just the details but the relevance of every note to the whole … Best of all, she communicates everything she has discovered about the music, and it is worth having.” This Portuguese pupil of Wilhelm Kempff, Pires was one of the artists who defined the Erato label in the 1970s and 1980s. This 5-CD box gathers together the recordings she made over the period from 1976 to 1985 and it reflects the consistent focus of her repertoire, with its special emphasis on Austro-German composers of the Classical and early-Romantic periods. Embracing solo works, piano duets and concertos, it contains works by Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven, but also by Bach and Chopin.