You'll have mazurkas coming out your ears by the end of next month. But what mazurkas they'll be! Fever pitch is approaching as the big pianistic guns line up to celebrate Chopin's 200th birthday anniversary on 1 March. The venerated pianists Krystian Zimerman and Maurizio Pollini and esteemed young pretender Yevgeny Sudbin are all to come at the South Bank. Last night at the Barbican, we had the opening salvo from the poet of the piano, Murray Perahia.

Heading up this month's classical selection is a 16-CD budget box set of the complete works of Frédéric Chopin, issued to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the consumptive Pole's birth. Plus we review a rare piano concerto by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a disc of even rarer string orchestra works by the post-war Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz, a fresh coupling of the Debussy and Ravel string quartets, a new version of Bruckner's mighty Eighth from the French-Canadian wunderkind Yannick Nézet-Séguin and two sets of historic recordings conducted by "Glorious John" Barbirolli.

Elisabeth Leonskaja, who turned 64 on Sunday, is one of the last links to a grand school of Russian pianism where technique meant the marshalling of piano possibilities into a positively orchestral array of expressive means. Often noted in harness with Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she frequently played, Leonskaja deserves renown of her own. Her all-Chopin recital last night at the Wigmore Hall had a splendour and focus that was truly of the Russian tradition, fervent in feeling, masterly in discipline, a serious line in beauty.