With the exception of Claudio Arrau, Shura Cherkassky is the only pianist this writer knows of whose recording career spanned the acoustic and digital eras. Compilations of his earliest recordings have appeared before on Biddulph (all the earliest discs) and Ivory Classics (two CDs of all the solo 1940s recordings). APR’s three-CD set promises ‘The Complete 78rpm Recordings 1923-1950’. Ivory Classics included a 1946 recording of Brahms’s F minor Sonata (no 78rpm matrix details given) which was, as I understand it, recorded on tape, briefly issued on shellac, then quickly withdrawn before appearing on a Vox LP in 1949. It’s a grey area. Whatever, APR’s is the most comprehensive single collection and has, by a country mile, the best annotation, booklet (Jonathan Summers) and transfers (Seth B Winner).

The earliest sides here date from 1924, four titles made for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, when Cherkassky was 15. Listening to the very first of them, the Beethoven Écossaises, that mischievous, teasing side of him that became so familiar in his later years was clearly already there, as was his melancholic, introspective side, illustrated by his own Prelude pathétique composed ‘at the age of 11’, so the cover of the sheet music boasted (inaccurately as it turned out for, to help his prodigy status, his birthdate had been adjusted from 1909 to 1911). The four acoustic sides were repeated in 1928 when the electrical process came in (to my mind without quite the same insouciance and flair) alongside four new titles made in 1925, including a garbled E minor Waltz (Chopin), the first of many forays into Godowsky (his transcription of Rameau’s Tambourin) and Prelude Op 73 by his lifelong friend, the extraordinary Mana-Zucca (1885-1981), actress, singer, pianist and composer born Augusta Zuckermann, whose music he championed throughout his career.

No more for Victor. Indeed, no more for anyone until 1934. For the US Columbia label Cherkassky made his one and only chamber music recording (a premiere recording at that): Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata with Marcel Hubert (a French cellist who toured the US in the 1920s and ’30s and about whom all annotators remain silent). This is well worth the price of the set, a seemingly effortlessly attuned partnership, stylistically adroit and something of a miracle that, at the time, such a relatively obscure and long work was ever sanctioned.

Cherkassky was the undisputed king of the encore and disc 2 is a series of encore-type pieces for the US Vox and Swedish Cupol labels made between 1946 and 1949. Outstanding among these are the four Liszt Hungarian Rhapsodies played with immense flair and confidence, and arguably the first illustration of Cherkassky as a mature artist.

Disc 3 is one of two halves. Though it is a compelling performance from the soloist, daring, constantly pushing forwards, electrifying at times, impulsive at others, his first recording of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto fails on three counts: the less than ideal acoustic of the Los Angeles venue, the undernourished Santa Monica Symphony and the savage cuts of the Siloti edition. Ah, but then listen to what follows: seven titles recorded at Abbey Road in 1950 for HMV. There are few pianists who can do regret and yearning quite as effectively as Cherkassky. And here I found something had unexpectedly got in my eye as I listened to Chopin’s Nocturne Op 72 No 1, the central chorale of his Fantasy, Liszt’s Consolation No 3 – for me the loveliest, most moving account I have ever heard – and Chaminade’s Autrefois, another favourite of the pianist, the outer sections of which, having known Cherkassky a little, might represent his self-portrait. All of the above evidence, if it were needed, of a keyboard charmer par excellence and one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.