MSR Classics’ four-CD tribute to the early career of Leonard Pennario celebrates a pianist whose star shone brightly for more than 60 years. Blessed with matinee idol looks, Pennario was every inch a jet-setting, white-tie-and-tails figure whose nonchalant virtuosity in a largely modern and Romantic repertoire left colleagues and admirers slack-jawed with envy and admiration. True, he could take a firm hand to lyricism and sound impatient with music’s more profound revelations. Yet if he left such speculation to others, he could rise to the occasion of, say, Ravel’s La valse with a supreme sense of its journey into nightmare, to Ravel’s thinly disguised demonism beneath his outwardly dapper and debonair surface. In the Liszt Sonata he surmounts every hurdle with yards to spare, playing with a leonine brilliance and command that will make lesser pianists despair, and if his Chopin is sometimes too civilised, even evasive, it is never less than fluent and musicianly.

But his characteristic briskness erases all possible sentimentality from Franck’s Prelude, chorale et fugue (what Cortot so mischievously called a “côté artisan d’église” element), his Mussorgsky Pictures are bold and incisively characterised and his Prokofiev Visions fugitives are brilliantly alive to all of their flashing whimsy. Horowitz himself listened in wonder to Pennario’s own Midnight on the Cliffs – “difficult, isn’t it!” – a Hollywood blockbuster etude composed for the film Julie starring Louis Jourdan as a murdering concert pianist, and his Variations on The Kerry Dancers is an affectionate and dazzling tribute to Ireland and John McCormack. All this and much more, lavishly presented and brilliantly remastered, make for a superb souvenir of a very special time in Pennario’s long and glittering career.