Frédéric Chopin’s 4 Scherzi are high points in the Romantic piano repertoire. Chopin here takes a traditional genre and fills it with radically new content. They are wild, demonic in tone, and there is little about them that is joke-like, despite the original meaning of their title. Referring to the 1st Scherzo, Robert Schumann asked: “how should seriousness be attired, when even a ‘joke’ is veiled in black?”.

Now that the Scherzi nos. 1–4 have been published in revised stand-alone editions, ...