Walter Gieseking was hardly the most consistent of great pianists but at his finest, as on this present issue of recordings dating from 1938-40, he offers playing of an astonishing fleetness and patrician beauty. Others – Claudio Arrau, for example – may have queried an approach to Beethoven where aristocratic understatement, backed by a phenomenal aural sensitivity and dexterity, replaces a more heaven-storming, robust rhetoric (‘his sound was not right in Beethoven’), yet Gieseking creates his own distinctive ambience and, like a river in full spate, sweeps all before him. Here with a vengeance are reminders that pianists of a past generation invariably chose tempi faster than their successors; a quality dictated by musical taste but also by the lighter instruments of the day.

The Waldstein Sonata’s first movement is presto rather than allegro con brio in a performance of an extraordinary feline virtuosity. Others may roar their passions to the heavens and achieve a darker drama and heft in the Appassionata but Gieseking once again creates his own entirely personal sense of menace and power. Such playing, like being at the centre of a vortex and by the pianist’s own admission, had little to do with hours spent in the practice room but rather with an innate musical and technical talent and perception. Again, in Opp 101 and 109 there is no sense of special pleading or underlining but rather a pace and urgency that always suggest ‘time’s winged chariot hurrying near’. All lovers of an entirely individual pianistic genius will have to have this and, once again, Ward Marston’s restoration is exemplary.