For the greater part these DVDs represent a cornucopia of present day, brilliantly evolving glory. Let no-one say that true artistry and virtuosity are dead, the province of a vanished breed. Pride of place must, I feel, go to Boris Berezovsky, a super-virtuoso, who hugs the towering challenge of Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Etudes to his breast in a bear-like embrace. Here, prodigies of virtuosity are provided with an outer nonchalance that will reduce lesser pianists to despair. Yet at the same time the beads and finally cascades of perspiration sparkling in the stage lights tell us not only of the temperature at La Roque d’Antheron in the summer of 2002 but of the effort of interpretation involved. True, he has difficulty relaxing into the relative calm of the less obviously demanding numbers (their lyricism part of Liszt’s lexicon of virtuosity) but there is a special sense of caprice beneath the volleys of notes in ‘Feux Follets’, and in ‘Chasse Neige’ the music boils with truly apocalyptic and ‘transcendental’ violence.

Nikolai Lugansky, masterly and persuasive in Brahms’s Op 118, suitably volcanic in his own pulverising paraphrase of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, is also no mean virtuoso. Yet for all his red-blooded, all-Russian impetus he allows nothing to impede the music’s natural line and momentum and in the great E flat minor Intermezzo from Op 118 (an epic in miniature if ever there was one) he achieves an almost palpable contact and rapport with his audience. What pent-up energy, strength and agility, too, in Rachmaninov’s C minor Prelude, Op 23, how all-encompassing his bravura in the E minor Moment musicaux. Liberated by immense technical resources his playing is free and disciplined, fervent yet controlled.

Vanessa Wagner may be less powerful and dramatic, but her Brahms and Schumann are richly inclusive, serious and musicianly at every level. Paradoxically she brings a rare clarity to Brahms’s cloudy and introspective romanticism in his Four Ballades, and her rapid reflexes bring an unusual degree of character and substance to the hallucinatory flight of No 3. Her balance between melody and accompaniment in No 4 is scrupulously maintained (never one thing at the expense of another) and both here and in Schumann’s problematic but hugely enjoyable First Sonata, her lucidity is unfailing. The second movement Aria, in particular, is hauntingly rapt and one suddenly finds oneself longing to hear her in the widest possible repertoire.

François-Frédéric Guy, a rapidly rising pianistic star, devotes his recital to Liszt. Unusually measured in the ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude’, he unfolds its mystical and lyrical effusion with a superb sense of occasion. Here is no salonish alternative to seriousness but a lovingly protracted sense of ardour and contemplation. In ‘Pensée des morts’ he stretches tempi to the limit for the ultimate in expressive intensity; here and in the B minor Sonata everything has a wealth of significance. Nothing is taken for granted, and the entire recital is a far cry from the theatrical image of Liszt of popular imagination. Guy is already a deeply serious and poetic Lisztian.

And so, too, is the more experienced Zoltán Kocsis who includes fellow-Hungarians Liszt, Bartók and Kurtág in his richly enterprising recital. He, again, is anxious to dispell any misconceptions of Liszt’s multi-faceted genius, choosing the elegaic Fifth Hungarian Rhapsody, the dark-hued Romanticism of the Third Années de pèlerinage and the formidably austere Csárdás Macabre over more flamboyant alternatives. Attuned to every demand (including the religious symbolism beneath the glittering sprays of Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este) he also gives us, most intriguingly, excerpts from Kurtág’s Jeux to say nothing of vivid, deeply committed readings of Beethoven’s Op 90, Schubert’s E minor and Bartók’s Sonatas.

Then there is Paul Lewis, a gentler visionary who devotes his recital to Schubert, a blessed Elysium after so much burning immediacy. Everything is freshly experienced; he has the gift of being able to rediscover his first love for music very much at the heart of his repertoire. Everything is personally yet selflessly inflected, nothing is forced or out of perspective, whether in the profoundly exploratory poetry of the Six Moment Musicaux or in the longer spans of the G major Sonata, the very epitome of lyricism. Resolute but never aggressive, all these performances are subtly and tellingly but never obtrusively detailed.

Finally, but much less convincingly, there is Francisco Libetta, who all too often reminds us that great artists achieve their legendary status not because of their technique (however astonishing) but because of their temperament, dazzle and charisma (to quote Horowitz: ‘without temperament, nothing’). Libetta’s technique is proficient but faceless and throughout his long, ill-assorted programme he remains oddly remote. In Liszt’s Totentanz, given in the solo version, his playing becomes tensionless and phlegmatic in the more reserved inward-looking variations, and the scintillating play of light and shade in Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse somehow eludes his imagination. The opening of Alkan’s Four Ages of Man is too fast for its cross accentuation to tell; elsewhere you are left aware of a capacity to present shoals of notes at high speed offset by an absence of musical character.

All these films are handsomely presented and recorded though several of the accomp-anying essays offer little more than empty publicity puffs.