In the great B flat Sonata, Kissin follows the Richter school of ignoring Schubert’s molto moderato in favour of andante. This comes hard to someone transported into another world by the opening of Schnabel’s 1939 recording (has anyone else played this theme so magically?). It’s not merely that the theme is barely sustainable at a slower pace than the one Schubert requested, it’s the fact that I feel I am being lectured about its nature and the circumstances in which it was composed.

Schnabel, the first to record the work, eschews the first movement repeat, as does Paul Lewis in the finest recording of recent years. If it is a sin to omit the nine linking bars, the repeat, when played at Kissin’s pace and with little expressive variation, throws the proportions of the sonata out of the window and undermines the effectiveness of the aching despair of the slow movement; the last two movements sound like appendages from a different work. In the Adagio, Kissin works hard to make sure we know how much he is suffering on behalf of Schubert (there’s even a weary grunt at 2'15"). The Scherzo and finale come as fresh air without rivalling Serkin’s life-affirming conclusion.

Then we are treated to Kissin the master pianist and, in the judiciously shaped and intensely moving Ständchen, to a languorous cantabile repose that we hear all too rarely, recorded, as throughout the recital, with a far more alluring tone than on his previous three discs. He is positively skittish in Das Wandern and smiling in Wohin?, while the seldom-played Aufenthalt (‘Resting Place’) provides both a tonal and compositorial link to the final selection.

Do not be alarmed by the mannered hesitations in the Mephisto Waltz’s introductory bars. This builds into a truly magnificent reading, rivalling Ashkenazy for brilliance and Ogdon for colour (both sadly nla) and without the idiosyncratic excesses of Horowitz (live in 1979: RCA, 11/93R). Here, Kissin’s fluency, dynamic control and musical imagination are beyond reproach, transforming an old display vehicle into a vital and expressive tone poem.