APR’s three-disc album of Wanda Landowska the pianist, rather than Landowska the iconic harpsichordist, throws down the gauntlet at present-day convention and received wisdom. Few musicians have exerted their will and personality more strongly, and the story of Landowska’s courage and perseverance (told with zest and a wealth of information in Jed Distler’s essay) will draw many up short. And if the character and audacity of virtually all these performances would be unthinkable from later generations, they would hopefully be among the first to admire an ethos and style so different from their own.

Landowska knew, too, that changing attitudes to scholarship and interpretation are the oxygen of creativity, so that while she could gently chide Casals (‘You play Bach your way and I’ll play him his way’), she was that rarest of musicians, an artist who could see beyond herself. Confronted by Glenn Gould’s legendary 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, she exclaimed: ‘I don’t like it, but he’s wonderful.’ At the same time she was quick to defend her full and free embellishment of Mozart’s melodic outlines, claiming that ‘a literal devotion to the page would have been called ignorant and barbaric by Mozart’s contemporaries’.

But turning from generality to so many examples of vivid and thought-provoking artistry, you are left to wonder at Landowska’s way with Mozart’s D minor Fantasia, her entirely personal eloquence. In the F major Sonata, K332, she is surprisingly pensive, while her performance of the D major Sonata, K576, is of a superfine brilliance. This appears in two recordings, the first incomplete, the second mercifully intact. And here, in particular, you are made aware of how few have achieved such an opening-out of Mozart’s inclusiveness, of both his joy and pain.

Puritans may find Landowska quirky; and it is true that in the B flat Sonata, K333, she is more assertive than gracious, hardly allowing the listener his own space. But overall, Landowska’s playing is a seemingly endless source of enlightenment. Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers are excellent, and these records should be heard by music college students in particular, to make them aware of other possibilities, of richer times and places.