During the last decade of her life, pianist Tatiana Shebanova (1953-2011) recorded just about all of Chopin’s solo piano output and complete piano-orchestral works for the Fryderyk Chopin Institute, using an 1849 Érard instrument. Some of these performances previously appeared in the Institute’s 21-disc collection ‘The Real Chopin’. They are not to be confused with the same pianist’s 10-CD box-set issued by Dux in 2008 containing Chopin’s complete solo works with opus numbers from 1 through 64, recorded on a modern concert grand.

Occupying discs 1 through 12, the chronologically ordered solo works allow one to follow Chopin’s creative journey from child prodigy to mature master step by step. Naturally this throws the opus numbers askew, resulting in some fascinating juxtapositions. For example, the masterly early Nocturne in E minor, Op 72 No 2, sits next to the relatively academic Sonata No 1 in C minor, Op 4. And to go straight from the lyrical Op 9 Nocturnes into the fiery B minor Scherzo, Op 20, is a jarring experience. Yet the salient features of Chopin’s quintessential style appeared more or less fully formed from the start: the ingenuously detailed decorative passages inspired by bel canto opera, the striking harmonic invention, plus an approach to timbre, nuance and keyboard deployment that would change the course of piano-writing for ever.

Listeners familiar with Shebanova’s Dux cycle will generally find her Érard interpretations stylistically similar. The pianist channels her wonderful technique towards musical ends, together with an internalised sense of rubato that never falls into the formulaic or generic. She avoids elongating down-beats or stretching out phrase-endings to habitual and ultimately predictable effect. For example, she’ll support a slight ritard in the main right-hand theme of the C sharp minor Polonaise, Op 26 No 1, by bringing the bass line to the fore. By contrast, the ubiquitous F sharp major Nocturne, Op 15 No 2, receives a wonderfully fluent and proportioned reading, with unusual attention to the coda’s supporting left-hand chords. Even the ever-popular A flat Polonaise, Op 53, sounds freshly minted, liberated from a century’s worth of empty display.

Shebanova unifies the 24 Preludes, Op 28, through intelligently considered tempo relationships that put character ahead of mere display. You’ll hear faster, more scintillating renditions of No 16 elsewhere but rarely one so dynamically ambidextrous. Likewise, Shebanova treats the Études as music instead of gymnastic events, where she particularly revels in the Érard’s slightly muffled, woodwind-like sustained notes in slower, more lyrical pieces (Op 10 Nos 3 and 6, Op 25 No 7). She justifies an unusually slow tempo for the Andante spianato, Op 22, by making the most of her instrument’s marked registral differentiation. These timbral characteristics come into their own throughout Shebanova’s long-lined phrasing of the Op 27 Nocturnes. On the other hand, the pianist doesn’t shirk from Chopin’s demonic codas in the first and fourth Ballades and first and third Scherzos (Shebanova’s transitions throughout Scherzo No 3 especially grip your attention).

Since the Mazurkas lend themselves to a wide and even antipodal range of interpretative vantage points, there’s certainly room for Shebanova’s intimately scaled conceptions, even if I’d prefer more swagger and athleticism in the way of Arthur Rubinstein’s 1950s cycle or Garrick Ohlsson’s dry wit. But she brings interesting ideas to the table in the mature sonatas. For instance, Shebanova begins the B flat minor’s unison ‘wind over the graveyard’ finale slowly, and then works up to a leisurely pace that allows the music’s chromatic motion and asymmetric melodic shapes to register. The B minor Sonata’s finale gains contrapuntal clarity through Shebanova’s discreet pedalling at the start; but once the themes are established, the pianist’s right foot gets busier, so to speak, and her tone ripens in turn.

If anything, Shebanova’s Érard F minor Fantaisie and Polonaise-fantaisie prove more colourful and dramatic than her modern grand traversals, but not her slightly sluggish and sectionalised Érard Ballade No 2 and Barcarolle. How fortunate that Shebanova lived to preserve her poetic interpretations of all of Chopin’s works for piano and orchestra with Frans Brüggen, who lavishes care and concern upon accompaniments that many conductors don’t take seriously. He gives the important first-desk soloists their due, while the strings’ minimum application of vibrato yields a fullness of body and tonal focus far removed from the scrawny caterwauling that all too often passes for ‘authenticity’.

Put simply, you won’t find a better period-instrument Chopin cycle involving a single pianist. Both this release and the aforementioned Dux box-set stand as fitting memorials to an outstanding pianist and Chopin practitioner who left us all too soon.