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Arthur Rubinstein (piano)EMI Classics455 3342 (5 CDs) *****

Chopin rarely sounds as noble or as fascinating as in the hands of Arthur Rubinstein. Yet Rubinstein remained true to Liszt’s description of Chopin’s creative genius as “imperious, fantastic and impulsive,” and of his rubato as “agitated, broken, interrupted, a movement flexible, yet at the same time abrupt and languishing, and vacillating as the flame under the fluctuating breath by which it is agitated”. EMI here collects Rubinstein’s great Chopin recordings of the late 1920s and 1930s, a time when he was still being attacked for representing what, strange as it may seem, he called “the straight, Mozartian Chopin”. The tensile strength of these recordings – the two concertos, the nocturnes, mazurkas, polonaises, scherzos and some shorter pieces – fully stands the test of time.