The description is Bruno Walter’s (‘he appeared to me like a new centaur, half piano, half man’). A prickly, Glasgow-born (1864) Anglophobic, d’Albert was among Liszt’s greatest pupils, married six times (number two was Teresa Carreño), composed a great deal, and died in Riga in 1932. Charlotte Pangels’s 1981 study of his colourful life and difficult personality still awaits an English translation.

All 44 of d’Albert’s recordings (plus three alternate takes) fit conveniently on to two well filled CDs. This is the first time these rare discs have ever appeared in toto and they provide revelatory glimpses of one of the titans of the keyboard. All except two excerpts from his opera Tiefland are acoustic (the last piano solo recording was made in 1922; the chamber movements in 1923) so the sound, though vastly improved from previous incarnations (eg, Concert Artist’s 1986 selection), is like listening to an iPod under a waterfall.

Though there are indeed at times ‘wrong notes, memory lapses and distorted rhythms’, the playing is far from causing ‘nothing but embarrassment…inexplicable’ (Harold C Schonberg). The early recordings in particular are assured and individual even if frequently eccentric – Chopin’s A flat Polonaise with a savage chunk missing, the ‘Butterfly’ study given with repeats and Schubert’s F minor Impromptu played like a Lisztian study.

Sadly, there is but one title each of Liszt and Brahms (whom d’Albert knew well); eight of the earliest (1910-12) titles are repeated in later sessions, d’Albert’s own Scherzo appearing three times; the three selections from his Capriolen suite are ordered wrongly in the otherwise excellent booklet (d’Albert plays 4: Missis-Massa – which includes the unexpected appearance of Dixie, 5: Der Zirkus kommt! and 2: Kose-Walzer). But, in short, this set is a valuable and essential acquisition for the collections of all serious pianophiles.