When Sir Clifford Curzon was always so reluctant to work in the recording studio‚ and then often rejected the results‚ one treasures such a compilation as this of live performances‚ flawed on detail as they can be. Anyone who wants to count the occasional slips of finger in his account of the Liszt Sonata for example‚ given at the 1961 Edinburgh Festival‚ will obviously reject it in fav­ our of the more studied‚ less spontaneous studio version he recorded for Decca two years later. Yet the impulsive energy of this live account is invaluable in letting us appreciate a side of Curzon’s genius rarely revealed in his official recordings‚ the daring of the virtuoso. As for the other Liszt items‚ they reveal his magic at its most intense‚ so that in the Petrarch Sonnet his velvet legato has one imagining a voice singing the words‚ and equally the improvisational quality he brings to his playing of Liszt is again magnetic in an account of the Valse oubliée full of fantasy. Liszt is not a composer one immediately associated with Curzon‚ great Mozartian and Schubertian as he was‚ yet his approach here is hardly less searching. In the Haydn Variations‚ a piece that can seem too formal and painstaking‚ he similarly finds sparkle and fantasy in a performance recorded for the BBC‚ and the Schubert Impromptus – for him core repertory – find him at his happiest‚ though his breathtakingly fast tempo for No 2 with its rippling scales in triplets may initially seem disconcerting. The singing legato of No 3 is then all the more soothing‚ and the textural contrasts of No 4 the more dramatic. The mono sound from the early ’60s may be limited‚ but undistractingly lets you enjoy the performances. The disc comes with an excellent note by Jonathan Dobson‚ which movingly quotes a remark made by Curzon in 1981 that in his boy­ hood playing the piano became ‘a lonely child’s retreat from a happy family’. That sense of wonder was a quality he kept throughout his life.