Muso’s five-disc album of performances dating from 1952 to 2010 commemorates 75 years of the Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition in Brussels. And whether you are for or against the heat and dust so often inseparable from the competition circuit, you will find in this selection of first-prize winners (five of them Russians) and some scarcely less brilliant also-rans an overall standard that is awe-inspiring.

Pride of place must surely go to Leon Fleisher, who even in the earliest stages of his career was a pianist of astonishing maturity and assurance. Few pianists of any age have displayed a more moving and concentrated eloquence in the Adagio of Brahms’s First Concerto or broken out into the light with such uninhibited brilliance in the finale. Then there is Vladimir Ashkenazy in Liszt’s First Concerto, playing with a speed, facility and lyric grace which, even when he threatens to derail both himself and the orchestra in the last pages, is simply phenomenal. Once described as a sort of pianistic Oistrakh (the first-prize winner of the inaugural Queen Elisabeth Violin Competition), he must now look back wryly to his triumph; later in his career Liszt was hardly among his favourite composers.

Another if very different pianism comes from Andrei Nikolsky, whose career was tragically ended in a car accident but who gives us a Rachmaninov Third of a scale and fulness the reverse of a mere pell-mell virtuosity. Any suggestion that his light is starting to fade in the finale is erased in a conclusion as exultant as you could wish. Frank Braley’s Beethoven Fourth is of an Olympian poise and serenity; and Denis Kozhukhin’s performance of Brahms’s Second Concerto is of an adamantine strength of purpose. His seeming perversity in his tough-minded view of the finale’s grazioso is hardly ‘a glory of tumbling gaiety’ (Edward Sackville-West), yet the conception is so powerfully unified that everything convinces.

Anna Vinnitskaya in Prokofiev’s Second Concerto (a grotesque masterpiece) shows the Russian virtuoso tradition writ large, and Jeffrey Swann’s way with Chopin’s First Concerto is a marvel of dazzlingly precise pianistic aplomb and, where required, rapt poetry. Less distinguished offerings come from Wolfgang Manz, who, while solid and dependable, carries too few revelations in Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto; and Malcolm Frager, disappointingly cool-headed in Prokofiev’s fire-spitting First Concerto, in music written to provoke and destabilise the more conservative elements of the Russian establishment. More generally, this is a compendium of truly great playing complemented today in 2013 by Boris Giltburg’s first prize and whose superb Prokofiev ‘War’ Sonatas disc I celebrated last year (Orchid, A/12). Other pianists on Muso’s album include Valery Afanassiev, Pierre-Alain Volondat and Cécile Ousset, making you long for further discs, of glories from Emil Gilels, Michelangeli, John Browning, Lazar Berman and Moura Lympany, to name but a few.