These performances were taken live from the Royal Festival Hall in 1967. And here, the klavier-tiger storms of Gilels’s first appearances in the West (for Claudia Cassidy, “of a blow-torch incandescence”) are resolved in playing of a transparency, elegance and calm that were no less characteristic of his later career. True, Gilels’s phenomenal command is much in evidence in the finales of both concertos, where the music quickens into life; and in, say, the presto coda of No 3, he may well cause lesser pianists to pale with envy. Yet even in this concerto a reserve hangs over the turbulent pages of “Beethoven’s C minor of life” (EM Forster). Everything falls naturally into place, unforced and not distorted by bluster or idiosyncrasy. Gilels makes the supposed division between Mozart’s Apollonian genius and Beethoven’s Dionysian genius dissolve in a trice.

Others may turn to the more overt, spine-tingling vitality of Serkin or the irrepressible joie de vivre of Argerich but, for unalloyed dignity and composure, these performances are hard to equal. Sir Adrian Boult’s gentlemanly, unobtrusive beat is a further asset in these finely transferred recordings.