Here on two DVDs, together lasting more than four hours, EMl mine the archives to give us one incomparable series of performances and another divided between a pianist who invites a storm of controversy and another whose star has never shone more brightly.

First things first, and Rostropovich’s and Richter’s complete cycle of the Beethoven cello and piano sonatas given in the Usher Hall, Edinburgh in 1964. As Robert Layton reminds us in his appreciative essay, even duos as celebrated as Casals and Horszowski, Piatigorsky and Solomon, or Fournier and Schnabel hardly achieved such flawless unanimity in both the letter and spirit of Sonatas ranging from Opp 5 to 102.

Rostropovich and Richter play, quite simply, as one, taking us and their lucky audience on a journey that is a marvel of sustained mastery and eloquence. Hear their hushed magic at the start of the First Sonata’s development (truly dolce and piano) or their knockabout sense of fun in the final Rondo and you will be made aware that nothing can quell their joy in recreation, in every aspect of Beethoven’s sensitivity and exuberance. Throughout, textures are kept meticulously clean, rhythms as spine-tingling as they are buoyant, and this despite often precipitate tempi that could so easily throw lesser players.

The two last sonatas where Beethoven, always the intrepid visionary and explorer, steps into the unknown, are given with a matchless sense of their verve and sobriety and never more so than in the closing fugue (a near relative of the fugue from the Hammerklavier piano sonata) of Op 102. As a substantial bonus, EMI adds a 1966 Moscow performance of Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses where Richter’s thunder and serenity would surely have taken the composer’s urbane nature by surprise.

From unqualified awe to animated discussion. Was there ever a more serious, less salonish, pianist than Claudio Arrau? How vividly I recall those London recitals in the 1960s when he would offer in a single programme, for example, Beethoven’s Op 111, Brahms’s F minor and Liszt’s B minor sonatas, shaking down the heavens and reminding you in the words of one critic of ‘Atlas holding up the universe’. One often left these occasion simultaneously exhausted and elated – and so it is with his Schumann in performances given in London between 1961-63. Every note is weighed and pondered with an overwhelming philosophical intensity of expression. You are always reminded that although Arrau was born in Chile, his training was rooted in Germany; few more darkly questing and Teutonic musical natures can ever have existed.

Understatement played little part in his musical make-up and as he himself put it reprovingly: ‘some pianists play very lacy’. So it is hardly surprising to hear his staunch rather than fleet way with the Concerto’s finale, an unsmiling rather than jocular ‘Pierrot’, and a ‘Coquette’ needing a lighter hand in Carnaval. His opening is emphatically maestoso (no ‘quasi’ about it) and, although he gives us a deeply impassioned ‘Chiarina’ and a ‘Chopin’ who seems to stand before you in all his tortured countenance, there is an absence elsewhere of a fragility, insouciance and naturalness no less central to Schumann’s character than his introspection. Playing that bears down so heavily is in danger of making Florestan and Eusebius sound the same person. By the time Arrau performed Beethoven’s last sonata in Paris in 1970 his playing had stiffened into emphasis and pedantry, his deft and, for him, despised early virtuoso years long forgotten.

And so we turn to the bonus track of Solomon in the Appassionata (London, 1956) with a blessed sense of relief. His drama is no less potent and yet, unlike Arrau, he wore his great gifts with a reserve that still penetrated to the very heart of everything he played. Seemingly bathed in a rare and crystalline light, his performance is free of all artifice or falseness, all straining for effect, so that time and again you are reminded of Shakespeare’s words, ‘O! it is excellent/To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous/To use it like a giant.’

The Rostropovich/Richter recital is well recorded, Richter’s Mendelssohn and Arrau’s Schumann less well. But nothing should deter the reader from investing in, first, an issue of supreme musical quality, and second, the work of a pianist who though personal to the point of idiosyncrasy could make even the finest of today’s young players sound puny by comparison. Arrau’s coughs after ‘Eusebius’ and ‘Chopin’ are a reassuringly human touch and the visual impact of these discs can hardly be overestimated.