In a small town on the Polish-Czech border where the mobile signal wanders between countries’ operators and only three inhabitants stick it out through the winter, animals are wreaking a terrible revenge. The bodies of murdered men, united in their penchant for hunting, have turned up in the forest, violently dead and rotting. Deer prints surround one corpse, beetles swarm another’s face and torso. Foxes escaped from an illegal fur farm need little motive to exact summary justice on their former jailor.

Can we ever really know the passion that brought our parents together? By the time we are old enough to hear the story of how they first met, that lovers’ narrative has frayed in the telling and faded in the daily light of domestic familiarity.

Held annually every Holy Week, Kraków’s Misteria Paschalia is one of the continent’s most vibrant early music festivals. With an increasing focus on international collaborations, the 2018 edition welcomed Edinburgh’s Dunedin Consort as artists in residence, and their director, Professor John Butt, as Resident Artistic Director.

Music competitions are big in Poland. Every five years the classical music world turns its attention to Warsaw for the International Chopin Piano Competition, with much commentary and speculation, and a succession celebrity laureated to maintain its global reputation.

A woman gives birth alone two months early in a frost-bound village in the Korean countryside. In Poland, a solitary woman washes down white migraine pills and concludes she must write. The child that is born dies. The finished book commemorates her death by according her an imagined life.

Pairing Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana with Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury makes for a pleasingly schizoid evening in the latest of Opera North's The Little Greats series. Mascagni’s crashing final chords precede a longish interval, and when you re-enter the auditorium it’s not just the set that’s changed, but much of the audience.

If individual greatness is to be found in the way an artist begins and ends a phrase, or finds magical transitions both within and between pieces, then Pavel Kolesnikov is already up there with the top pianists. Listeners tuning in midway through the peaks of his lunchtime Prom – the great Chopin Fantaisie or the Fourth Scherzo – might have thought they were listening to an old master, while what we saw was a modest 28-year-old who looks much younger, but who moves with total assurance and absence of flash. His performance of Tchaikovsky's massive Second Piano Concerto with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland was one of the highlights of last year's Proms; this took us even further in a Chopin odyssey intelligently planned and ineffably well-executed.

Kolesnikov programmed his recital in the shape of a giant Chopin butterfly with two iridescent wings of consecutively played miniature masterpieces leading to bigger numbers and the great Op. 49 Fantaisie as the central body. Its imaginative genius for connection is something I well remember in a Chopin recital by his great mentor, Elisabeth Leonskaja, each of her halves played without applause between pieces; Kolesnikov already has a similar balance between Russian orchestral pianism and the capacity for sudden flight. The concert began with spaciousness in the A flat major Waltz, but no repeat is ever the same in this pianist’s hands, and nothing stays solid for long. Extremes were licensed in the C sharp minor Waltz, beautifully connected to the Fantasie-Impromptu in the same key. Kolesnikov never rushes: even his most headlong brilliance comes up for air in well-placed "breaths".

Five of the amazing Mazurkas, a selection of which Kolesnikov has recorded, showed Chopin’s infinite variety on the most intimate scale: playful in the major-key specimens, from the charm of the composer’s youth to the contrast of the rustic-rollicking C major, Op. 56 No. 2 with the sophisticated A flat major, Op. 50 No. 2; and introspective in the minor, supremely so in an intensely chromatic swansong (Op. 68 No. 4). Kolesnikov had even chosen a brighter action to his Yamaha plano for the third part of his programme, necessitating a keyboard change by four technicians while he chatted sensibly with Petroc Trelawny; like Richter, he never makes the instrument produce the brittle clarity for which it can be notorious.

Those mazurka rhythms made an immediate connection with the start of the E major Scherzo (Chopin's manuscript pictured above), a paradigm of Kolesnikov’s sleight-of-hand between the well-weighted and the ethereal. And the Fantaisie showed his integrity in large-scale thinking, feeling very much like a final work – though in fact it was composed eight years before Chopin’s untimely death – in its search for a peace found in the very moving benediction before the still-questioning final bars.

The bright encore was the Grande Valse Brillante, scaled down at first to intimacy but growing wings like everything else in the programme. The BBC’s Young Generation Artists, including Kolesnikov among their number, are no chrysalids when they make their first radio appearances, but when they take off into the big wide world like Francesco Piemontesi and his equally thoughtful confrère whom we heard here with such unremitting pleasure, the choice is fully vindicated. Besides, anyone who relishes the risk-taking of Amy Winehouse, stands in the Arena for the Proms late-nighter of Rachmaninov's Vespers, and collects old perfumes, is fine by me.

• Listen to this concert for the next 28 days on the BBC iPlayer
• Read more classical reviews on theartsdesk

Next page: watch Kolesnikov play Chopin's Mazurka in A minor, Op. 68 No. 2