Like the Verbier Festival, ‘Festival Martha Argerich’ hosts some of the world’s best-known soloists, as well as some who aren’t so well known but should be. This particular sequence, recorded at Hamburg’s Laeiszhalle in 2021, commemorates the pianist Nicholas Angelich, who died aged 51 after an unsuccessful lung transplant. Angelich, a distinguished Brahmsian, can be heard at his best in Brahms’s E flat Viola Sonata with Gérard Caussé, whose sensitive playing only occasionally strays off the note’s centre. Emotionally charged, rich-toned Mendelssohn is provided by Argerich, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Mischa Maisky in the First Piano Trio, more overtly demonstrative but (to these ears at least) less musically persuasive than an account of the Second Trio included in the previous volume of recordings from this source, where Argerich joins forces with violinist Renaud Capuçon and cellist Edgar Moreau.

Argerich pairs with Capuçon for a memorable reading of Beethoven’s G major Violin Sonata, while Alissa, Natalia and Jura Margulis offer a classically tempered Beethoven Ghost Trio and a moving account of Casals’s Song of the Birds, dedicated to the memory of the cellist Alexander Buzlov.

Argerich ‘off the leash’ offers a typically energetic account of Beethoven’s Second Concerto, similar in essence to other live versions we have from her – less finely tailored than, say, Brendel or Kempff but with no holds barred, which is the case with virtually everything she does, except in quieter music (I cite by way of an example the first movement second subject of Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata with Maisky), where she invariably reaches further inwards. Then again, switch to the motoric second movement and both players apply maximum pressure.

Pressure is far from the essence of Maria João Pires’s Schubert (Impromptus D935 Nos 2 and 3 and Sonata in A, D664), which emerges like stories freshly told. Sample 4'59" into the third Impromptu to hear how Pires handles the unexpected shift to the minor. Magic, nothing less. Pires joins forces with Argerich for Mozart’s Sonata for piano four hands, K521, where both players deliver on all fronts.

Shostakovich’s Concertino for two pianos (Argerich with Lilya Zilberstein, already recorded by these artists – Warner, 11/07), although spirited, strikes a more serious note than either of the piano concertos. Prokofiev’s warmly expressive Flute Sonata finds Argerich in a more reserved mood, her keen and colour-conscious collaborator Susanne Barner, who also joins pianist Akane Sakai for Weinberg’s gnomically rewarding Twelve Miniatures. And there’s more – Falla, Piazzolla, Babadjanian, Bartók and Bernstein. Not all involve Argerich, of course, but such is her charisma and love for the people she works with that you feel her presence everywhere. A wonderful collection, like its predecessors, but were I to choose one of the three volumes so far issued as a first choice, it would be Vol 2, which includes a remarkable coupling of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto (soloist Argerich) and Stravinsky’s Les noces, with Charles Dutoit conducting.