Who has still got their LP of RCA Victrola VIC1210 “Keyboard Giants of the Past”? It was instrumental in firing my lifelong enthusiasm for historic piano recordings. I hope this compilation has the same effect on another generation. Seasoned pianophiles will have all or, at least, most of the titles here, but if David Patmore's choice is perplexingly arbitrary and by no means always representative of the best work of the 20 pianists, it still provides a tempting Beginners' Guide to Historic Piano Performances.

It is also a vade mecum of studio piano acoustics, and the varying success of the transfers makes for an uneasy listen when the whole disc is played at a sitting. There is no attempt at musical or performance chronology. Thus Rubinstein's signature Ritual Fire Dance (1947) is followed by Paderewski in, all too predictably, his Minuet in G (1926) and, quite unexpectedly, Godowsky playing the Schubert-Tausig Marche militaire, a single-sided acoustic from 1920 in a transfer that sounds as if it's been processed through a blanket (listen to Ward Marston's vastly superior effort on Marston 52046).

Rachmaninov's 1919 Edison recording of the Prelude is preferred to either his 1921 or 1928 versions; Barere is represented, enterprisingly, by his 1950 Remington recording of Liebesträume No 3 (one day someone will reissue all these sessions on CD) and Gilels by Rachmaninov's Daisies (1945) in a hideous ambience. Richter is the only pianist to be heard in a concerto (the finale of Prokofiev's First). It's a bit of a lucky-dip, but such quirky randomness exercises its own charm.