How to discuss playing of a unique calibre in a short review? So much of this five-disc tribute to Myra Hess cries out for loving and detailed commentary. A reluctant recording artist,
Hess missed direct communication with her audience, seeing the studio as a cold and unresponsive alternative. Yet in one disc after another you are drawn towards a deeply personal quality that endeared her to thousands, her very avoidance of fuss or externals somehow creating its own image. And if, as Barenboim so aptly put it, Cortot ‘discovered the opium in Chopin’, Hess conveyed a seraphic beauty that left her listeners, particularly in America, transfixed.

Leaving behind early success in the virtuoso repertoire, Hess moved towards music which she saw as of ultimate stature; and her way with, for example, Beethoven’s Op 109 and 110 Sonatas is limpid and serene, their underlying dramas played down but not erased. She could surprise, too, in repertoire outside her later purview. What warmth, nuance and freedom in Chopin’s F sharp Nocturne, while her way with Granados’s ‘The Maiden and the Nightingale’ is as romantic as the most ardent lover of this work could wish. More critically, the first disc prompts a feeling of lethargy, most notably in Schubert’s A major Sonata, D664, though even here her Victorian, old-fashioned sentiment is erased in a nimble and vivacious finale. The bittersweet world of the Brahms Intermezzos finds her at her most rapt and communing (try Op 76 No 3), yet her grateful retreat into confidentiality is countered in one Scarlatti sonata in particular (Kk14 in G), spun off with the most life-enhancing joie de vivre and dexterity.

More generally speaking, the later versions of each work emerge in fresher, finer sound, allowing one to savour, for example, Hess’s melting way with the A flat episode at the heart of the Schumann Concerto’s first movement. And if the finale remains staid in both versions, a no doubt deliberately qualified view of Schumann’s vivace marking, her special association with this concerto shines out elsewhere. This set will prompt endless reappraisal as well as ample confirmation of Hess’s enduring celebrity.