A tribute to true musical greatness, APR’s reissue of Edwin Fischer’s complete Mozart studio recordings dating from 1933-47 is cause for endless celebration. For at its greatest, Fischer’s Mozart, like Cortot’s Chopin, could take wing, seemingly existing in an ether above and beyond the printed page. True, like many other great artists, his inspiration could falter and fluctuate; but when you listen, for example, to the finale of K503 you will hear a delectably light-fingered virtuosity (and too much has been made of Fischer’s occasional nervous instability) combined with a poetic commitment rare in today’s chaotic musical marketplace.

Fischer’s “indefinable glow”, his ease and naturalness, make the central section of the D minor Concerto’s central Romanze a light rather than heavy downpour, a magical instance of his differentiation between Mozart’s essentially Apollonian as opposed to Beethoven’s Dionysian genius. The finale of K482 is, again, a marvel of nimbleness and musical grace and, as Emanuel Ax once remarked of Claudio Arrau’s early recordings, “he can make us young ones sound positively arthritic”. Both the C minor Fantasias show Fischer no less alert to the darker regions of Mozart’s mind; more generally, preening sophistication or falsity were entirely alien to Fischer’s innocent and, in the most positive sense, naive nature. Mozart’s greatness provided him with an ideal outlet to conjure a refutation of early ignorance. For Ernest Newman Mozart’s music was like “the prattling of a child” while at a later date Walter Gieseking, no less, found only an unclouded state in Mozart. Fischer’s unapologetically fulsome and romantic cadenzas may raise some eyebrows – Brendel considers them “deplorable” – but the awe and admiration of his finest pupils (they include Brendel, Barenboim and Badura-Skoda) is as understandable as it is unstinting. APR’s transfers are admirable and all three discs are a mine of musical instruction and delight.