It is a tragedy that Josef Lhevinne, indisputably one of the greatest pianists of the last century, recorded so little. His commercial recordings for the Victor Talking Machine Co and RCA Victor, best-sellers in their day and rarely out of the catalogue since they were first issued, together with the four acoustic titles he made for Pathé and the pair of two-piano discs he cut with his wife Rosina (Debussy-Ravel Fêtes, Mozart Sonata K448) all fit neatly on to a single CD. ‘Among the greatest 71 minutes you will spend with a pianist’ was how one critic once put it. There is an outstanding two-disc set of Lhevinne’s Welte-Mignon piano rolls from 1906 and 1911 to be heard (Tacet, A/10), and various bits and bobs on other discs. And that appeared to be that. Until now.

Any self-respecting collector, pianophile or not, will already have the Pathé/Victor/RCA discs in one form or another (they were last issued by Naxos in 2002 in much-improved transfers by Ward Marston). Lhevinne’s 1928 (abridged) account of the Schulz-Evler transcription of The Blue Danube waltzes has never been surpassed. I’m baffled why Jonathan Summers, in his otherwise excellent booklet, should refer to it as ‘almost infamous’, with the negative connotation of that term. Mention this recording – and particularly the double-octave salvo in the coda – to any professional pianist and they are likely to say ‘I don’t know how he did that’ (it took Lhevinne 12 attempts before he was satisfied). There is the dazzling dispatch of Schumann’s Toccata, the noble singing line in the Schumann-Liszt Frühlingsnacht (both single takes from the same session on June 7, 1935). Of his effortlessly elegant Chopin, we have four Études, two Preludes and the A flat major Polonaise. The Pathé discs include Rachmaninov’s G minor Prelude (uncharacteristically, for this source, wrongly numbered here) and Tchaikovsky’s ‘Trepak’ from his 18 Pieces for piano, Op 72.

A second complete performance of K448, unknown to most collectors, is included, almost identical to (and recorded on the same day as) the one eventually given its first release on an RCA LP in the 1950s. Whatever the minor blemishes of ensemble, what other recording has ever captured the spirit of the work in quite the same way? That really does seem to be the complete commercial recordings of Lhevinne, but the USP of this set is of course all the previously unissued broadcast performances. These begin with Mozart’s early F major Concerto for three pianos, K242, here arranged for two (the two pianists being the Lhevinnes again), and conducted by no less than John Barbirolli with the New York Philharmonic. For an off-air recording from 1939, the sound is remarkably good, despite the momentary (disconcerting) dropout towards the end of the second movement when the recording disc ran out of time and had to be turned over. It’s an endearing historic performance, complete with overblown 19th-century last-movement cadenza.

Even more remarkable is the broadcast of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet, recorded by a retired attorney in 1942 using two turntables recording at 78rpm. Here, the resulting sound is not far inferior to early studio mono, though Lhevinne emerges too far back in the balance and the two violins, as a result, are a shade relentless. Still, not enough to obscure his captivating, light, precise touch and what the American composer Ernst Bacon described as ‘velvet euphony; at times he seemed to glide over the keys like a gull over water’. This is one of very few known examples of a pianist from the so-called Golden Age in a chamber-music ensemble of more than three people.

Disc 3 is important, too, for not only did Tchaikovsky inscribe the title-page of his Op 72 ‘To Josef Lhevinne, a talent’, but he also coached him in the B flat minor Concerto. There have been copies of off-air recordings floating about for many years of Lhevinne playing movements of the work. Here, for the first time, are not one but two (albeit incomplete) performances of this most popular of all Russian piano concertos. A 1933 NBC broadcast was captured of the complete second and third movements, the first having been played the previous week in a broadcast of which no recording has survived. Lhevinne’s playing is mesmeric, particularly in the slow movement, with the central scherzo as light as a feather, executed in big paragraphs. (Interestingly, the third note of the famous opening flute solo is an F natural as notated in the composer’s own score, and not a B flat as in the standard printed score.) In the finale, the conductor (Rosario Bourdon) seems to miss the tutti down beat 12 bars from the end, momentarily throwing Lhevinne.

The second (almost complete) performance of the concerto is hitherto unknown. It was made during the October 1936 Worcester Festival, Massachusetts, by the festival’s management. The sound here is more compromised in terms of surface noise and balance – if you want to hear the horn part given more than its due, here’s your chance – and the first 101 bars were not recorded. There are other missing bars and sections where the music becomes almost inaudible. But there is more than enough of Lhevinne to sustain interest throughout – and it is followed by an encore of the same Chopin B flat minor Prelude he had recorded so memorably just 10 months earlier. Indeed, the four other encores preserved on this third CD are all pieces set down earlier for RCA Victor.

All in all, this is a most valuable repository of timeless treasures to be savoured down the generations. We are once more in the debt of producers Scott Kessler and Ward Marston.