You know you’re getting on a bit when record labels start issuing as ‘historic’ recordings which you bought when they were first released. A Saga EP of Leff Pouishnoff playing Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu was one of the first classical discs I ever bought with my own money. But what’s this? From executive producer Michael Spring’s supplement to Jonathan Summer’s model booklet, I learn that there is the possibility that it may not be Pouishnoff playing at all but Sergio Fiorentino. Spring makes a good stab at unravelling the Saga saga, a continuing record industry mystery involving the late William Barrington-Coupe, fraudster husband of his wife and accomplice Joyce Hatto.

Meanwhile, on disc 1, we alight on incontestably genuine Pouishnoff recordings that have not seen the light of day for many decades: 12 Columbia acoustics from 1922 which disclose a fiery and fluent technique allied to a blunt and perfunctory musicality. Repertoire junkies will enjoy two rare Saint-Saëns transcriptions, Glazunov’s Polka played by a pupil of the composer and three brief encores by Pouishnoff himself. With the 13 Columbia electrics (1926 29), not only the sound improves but also Pouishnoff’s response to the music. Chief among them is only the second recording ever made of a complete Schubert piano sonata, a reading of great integrity and delicacy that I found utterly captivating. For those to whom it matters, the first two movements are played without repeats. Here, in the two Liszt concert studies and the three Godowsky transcriptions, we get the full measure of a major artist and his famous luminous tone.

As to the selected Saga recordings of 1958, any poetry in the playing of the four Chopin pieces (and that’s not saying much) is compromised by a badly voiced A flat above middle C. It does not affect the Glazunov Theme and Variations (originally entitled Variations on a Finnish Folk Song). While I wouldn’t be without Stephen Coombs’s 1995 Hyperion recording, which also offers separate tracks for each of the 15 variations, Pouishnoff’s is a notable addition to the catalogue, with a spirit and spontaneity entirely lacking in the Chopin works.