After five volumes of Cortot’s Chopin, Naxos continues with a miscellany dating from 1929 to 1937 of an incomparable glory. Made long before today’s scissors-and-paste, splicing-and-slicing productions, the playing scintillates with a quality and magic peculiarly Cortot’s own. Above all, Cortot was the greatest “singer”of the keyboard; the possessor of a ravishing cantabile of a haunting sweetness and intensity.

Everything here is delectable but the very disc itself would object if I did not single out the pianist’s arrangement of the Largo from Bach’s F minor Concerto, something for everyone’s desert island and enough to bring tears to the eyes of even the most puritan listener. Again, Cortot may have noted a quality he described with typical French irony as “an excess of incense and piety” in César Franck. But he was the supreme champion of his music and no other pianist has come closer to the emotional glow at the very heart of Franck’s genius. Hear him in the Prélude, aria et final and you will hear a rubato that tugs now gently, now urgently against the music’s line and impetus, its religious life seemingly improvised on the spot.

Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, the concert-hall glitter and aplomb of Saint-Saëns’s Etude en forme de valse is thrown off with a virtuosity that even aroused Horowitz’s envy. This remains among the most dazzling jeux d’esprit on record. Naxos’s accompanying essay will appeal to the date-minded and Ward Marston has done his usual wonders with sound and restoration. Hopefully there will be much, much more Cortot to follow.