Avid collectors of this most mercurial and image-conscious of pianists will snap up Naxos’s offering of these performances recorded in 1957. Two years later Gould was to give a performance of Beethoven’s Second Concerto with Joseph Krips at London’s Royal Festival Hall of a truly extraordinary brilliance and eccentricity, an occasion when he ignored his partner, ostentatiously conducting from the keyboard himself. Earlier he had demanded that all air-conditioning in the hall be switched off as, resplendent in fur coat, he claimed he felt the cold. Yet the performance was unforgettable, including a sudden decrescendo in the concerto’s concluding double-note trill so steep that listeners felt as if they had been abruptly hurled off a cliff. The present performance is hardly as memorable, though Gould’s admirers will thrill once more to his spruce, spine-tingling brilliance even if others feel nostalgia for a higher degree of subtlety. For all its flair and super-charged brio, this performance lacks humanity.

Gould was much less comfortable with Brahms (witness his weird and only occasionally wonderful ways with the First Concerto and several solo pieces) and his light tripping through the Piano Quintet’s Andante un poco adagio will strike many as a glib alternative to seriousness. In conclusion I doubt whether this performance, heard as if through sandpaper, will appeal when there are so many more urgently committed artists to be heard in modern sound. Strictly for Gould aficionados.