Who remembers Leonard Shure (1910-95)? Certainly his students, who often quaked under his critical savagery. I once attended a masterclass in Texas where the more gifted pianists were generally ignored in favour of a merciless assault on the less talented. As an artist and former Schnabel student and teaching assistant, his playing was of a rough-hewn force and a brutal intensity that made it clear he had little time for easy glamour, for theatricality or preening self-interest. He was essentially a musician first and a pianist second. So those looking for, say, Pollini’s intimidating perfection or Argerich’s flashes of summer lightning in the Schumann Fantasie will be in for a rude surprise. Here, the second movement’s coda – that locus classicus of the wrong note – is wildly inaccurate and so too is the conclusion of a finale once characterised as like ‘so much rapidly shifting sunset vapour’.

The coda of Chopin’s First Ballade is thrilling if chaotic, yet in the same composer’s Second Sonata Shure achieves a movingly simple eloquence in the Funeral March, and never more so than in its central Elysium. Again, he is at his best in the alternating stormscapes and bittersweet dreaming of Brahms’s Op 116 Piano Pieces; music where, despite many slips of finger and memory, he engrosses his audience, whose wild applause testifies to their involvement in the life-and-death struggle of a pianist who attempts to wrest an ultimate significance from his often recalcitrant material. These, then, are performances of great documentary interest by a more than singular artist. Shure’s annotator, Richard Dyer, makes a brave and lengthy case for his hero’s cause. The recordings, mostly taken from live recitals at the New England Conservatory between 1977 and 1980, faithfully capture Shure’s gritty protagonism.