As you would expect from this youngest ever winner of the Warsaw Chopin Competition Yundi’s playing is technically lithe and of an immaculate taste and discretion. Yet in the Nocturnes he gives us Chopin as we have always known him. There is a sense, notably in prosaic performances of the A flat Nocturne, Op 32 No 1, and the E major, Op 62 No 2, of a pianist no longer surprised by Chopin’s singularity, of over-familiarity with a language as intricate and original as it is evocative. Yundi can be oddly impersonal in the C sharp Nocturne, Op 27 No 1 (music which reminded the critic James Huneker of a corpse washed ashore in a moonlit Venetian lagoon), and here in particular you are made aware of a pianist who has not lived long enough with this music to make it supremely his own. Highlights, on the other hand, include a magically dreaming F sharp minor Nocturne, Op 48 No 2, with a fine dignity and restraint in the central più lento. Yet overall these performances are insufficiently alluring, particularly when you compare them with Maria João Pires’s more fervent and personal engagement (DG, 10/96) and most of all with Rubinstein whose early set of the Nocturnes, now available on Naxos (6/01), has never been surpassed for patrician elegance and continuous revelation. Yundi is finely recorded and future Chopin discs are awaited with much interest.