This delightful collection of recordings from the 1940s commemorates a pianist who graced the concert stage with musicianship of a quiet and unassailable quality. Kathleen Long (1896­1968) characteristically confessed that she was without ambition and cited practice as ‘the greatest pleasure of my life.’ A richly experienced chamber musician‚ she was partnered and praised by Casals‚ played Ravel’s ‘Ondine’ to the composer and gave over 60 National Gallery concerts during the Second World War. As The Times so admirably put it‚ ‘she plays the piano as though she likes it‚ as though it was an instrument of music and not an organ of rhetoric or an engine of artillery‚ and she plays a wide variety of music with such an honest transparency that it all comes out as a faithful reflection of the composer’s thought.’ This is surely of the essence: though her playing may initially seem too restrained‚ you find yourself wondering why you have never enjoyed music so much or been made so aware‚ however unobtrusively‚ of its innermost spirit. Long was a born aristocrat of the keyboard and you will look in vain for any overt or disfiguring drama in her lucid and stylish performance of Mozart’s C minor Concerto‚ its underlying tension focused in a superb first­movement cadenza and in apt flourishes elsewhere. Boyd Neel’s way of edging into the opening of K450 may seem old­fashioned when judged by today’s severer taste‚ but both he and van Beinum work hand in glove with Long in her fluent and relaxed view of two supremely contrasted concertos. Walter Leigh’s Concertino (1934) suggests English pastoralism with a troubled undertow and is spun off as to the manner born‚ but it is in Fauré’s Ballade that Long makes her finest impression. Indeed it is difficult to imagine this magical work played more serenely or inwardly. Even French critics – wary of foreign interpreters – marvelled over this recording‚ wondering at Long’s ‘sonorité veloutée et limpide’. Her affection is evident in every caressing bar and makes for a perfect conclusion to a delectable disc. The recordings have come up well and the inclusion in the booklet of a 1950 Gramophone interview dating is an illuminating bonus.