Solomon, the greatest pianist the UK has produced by a long chalk, recorded fairly regularly from 1941 until the end of his career. It is an enormous shame that the record industry had only just woken up to his exceptional quality when he fell silent after a severe stroke in 1956. Thank heavens for Walter Legge for getting things moving after the war by retaining Solomon for HMV as Schnabel’s obvious successor. That was for Beethoven principally, and we are already in Testament’s debt for handsomely presenting what was achieved towards a complete cycle of the sonatas: 18 of them, all bar one recorded between 1951 and Solomon’s enforced retirement five years later (11/00).

Testament now offer these three well-filled CDs, and the technical quality of the refurbishment is terrific. With Walter Legge not only the instigator of these recordings but the producer of many of them, the original sound is usually pretty good. The Scriabin Concerto, disadvantaged by a duff balance, is the one disappointment here.

It has been suggested that Solomon was at his zenith in the late 1940s, with a dynamism and allure that shaded into mellower qualities as Beethoven occupied him more and more, the big Romantic concertos less and less. That’s not to imply a falling-off: the Grieg and Schumann concertos, recorded at the very end of his career, display a power and a lustre equal to anything achieved earlier. At this time, he began to be worried by signs of the disability that was to cripple him, but you would be hard put to find more than a whisker amiss, technically speaking, and the eloquence and fluency of his rhetoric – an ideally defined range of gesture and beautiful sound never overstated – never falters.

In the Tchaikovsky Concerto (1949) and the Liszt Hungarian Fantasy (1948) you sense an edge to Solomon’s temperament in those years that could bring forth playing of extraordinary voltage. Even then, however, the excitement appears an apt means towards a heightening of musical effect. The Liszt, once described as ‘one of the great inspirational 15 minutes of gramophone history,’ is an absolute must-hear.

We must be grateful to Legge, again, for enabling Solomon to be partnered so often with the Philharmonia whose contribution here is everywhere distinguished: go to the beginning of the Schumann Concerto for a sample. Perspectives of piano with orchestra are not always as they should be in the Tchaikovsky, with spotlit wind solos and the soloist pulled back in the biggest moments, as if Solomon weren’t the best judge of how much sound he should give. But at least you can hear him. This is his second recording of a work that he always made fresh and it is very fine.

The Scriabin Concerto, on the other hand, he had never played. This recording seems to me a tantalising might-have-been. In most of it Solomon appears as though through a glass darkly – was Legge preoccupied with something else at the time? Testament will have done their best to retrieve it, but the balance in the opening movement is weird, skewed, doomed. The rest, more successful, affords glimpses of blazing piano playing as well as convincing shaping from Dobrowen, and the Philharmonia are obviously doing their stuff, so the reported reasons of soloist and conductor for not agreeing to the issue of the recording – that Scriabin’s idiom had eluded them – do not, I think, ring true.

I would not be without any of these CDs. Solomon’s Schubert may prompt reservations: it is firmly directional, the line held against a steady pulse, rather as you would expect in Beethoven, but his grace in the Little A major Sonata D664 is an enchantment – lyrical, balletic, airborne – and the expression ideally weighted.

I heard him quite often, mostly in broadcasts but also at concerts, and his playing was formative. I thought him then without peer. It was not that he was just accurate and reliable: his control, which did not falter, was as much musical as technical, and it was always the music which spoke – as one listened, the mechanics of what he did simply fell away.

If he was sometimes thought austere, or self-effacing, it was probably because he had no pianistic vanity. His range of dynamics and colour, at subdued levels especially, and his ability to sustain slow tempi and long spans of quiet sound with an ineluctable forward movement and acuteness of expression, were very much part of his armoury. But it was the core of the music that he sought and illuminated. There was a passion and thrust behind his playing that made you feel how the total structure of the Schumann Concerto or Beethoven’s last Sonata – not just the details and the surface – have an audible power. If pushed to pluck out one performance from the collection here it would have to be Beethoven’s Op 111. The first of his two recordings of the work, from 1948, it at once displays – and goes beyond – all the qualities I’ve enumerated, the ‘historical’ sound of no consequence as against the luminous energy and boundless vitality of sound and rhythm and the urgent beauties of the statement.