Shura Cherkassky was usually at his best in front of an audience rather than in the studio. Here are four (almost) complete recitals, typical Cherkassky programmes, recorded purely for archive purposes between 1981 and 1989 in the Ambassador Auditorium, on the campus of Ambassador College, Pasadena, California.

Disc 1 has a recital from April 29, 1981. It’s an all-Chopin programme, a rarity for Cherkassky, and one that does not show this great artist at his best. The Ballade No 1 was a work he did not play that often and finds him at his most wayward and unpredictable. The hidden voices he loved to illuminate are here strangely inappropriate and distracting, as are the exaggerated ritenutos in the coda. Things get very much better after this, for one of life’s great pleasures is to hear Cherkassky playing a Chopin nocturne (melancholy is something he conveys better than most), and the first half ends with a neatly executed Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise brillante, another work he played infrequently. The chorale central section of the Fantaisie in F minor is heartbreaking. But the Fantaisie-impromptu, Scherzo No 2 and the Op 42 Waltz (offered as an encore) are all puzzlingly rushed and impatient. Audience applause, which tends to begin before the last note has sounded, is retained throughout.

Its absence in the next recital (January 13, 1982) gives the impression of being played to an empty hall. Cherkassky opens with one of his favourites, Lully’s Suite de pièces, followed by a Mendelssohn rarity, his Scherzo a capriccio in F sharp minor, both works he programmed regularly that year. There’s a dogged rather than inspired Tchaikovsky Grand Sonata, and a Polonaise-fantaisie and Ballade No 4 in much the same vein, before one of the finest of his myriad accounts of (his teacher) Josef Hofmann’s Kaleidoskop. That’s followed by an imperious rendering of the Don Juan Fantasy, rather spoilt by fluffs and cuts (including the prestissimo coda). The applause that follows the last encore, Chopin’s Op 42 Waltz, sounds like it is edited in. A mixed bag.

Best of the bunch is the recital of November 18, 1987, spread over two discs. Even here, though, there are some puzzlingly un-Cherkasskian moments. Franck’s Prélude, choral et fugue is forcefully projected while Carnaval, littered with clinkers and smudges, strives too hard for effect. The second half is on a different level. Rachmaninov’s Corelli Variations was a work Cherkassky often played that season: serene, melancholy and free of exaggeration. There’s another terrific Kaleidoskop, a Chopin nocturne and the Barcarolle, and a blistering Gound-Liszt Faust paraphrase to end with. Among the encores is another Cherkassky speciality, the Behr-Rachmaninov Polka de WR. No one has ever eked out the two parallel themes in the middle quite as teasingly as he. Delicious.

‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’ was not part of Cherkassky’s regular repertoire (there’s a BBC studio recording from the 1960s) but that is what opens the fourth recital (November 2, 1989). We then have a disappointingly restrained final movement of Schumann’s Fantasie (the first two movements are not included ‘due to technical issues’, whatever that means). Again, it’s the playing after the interval that is most successful: Tchaikovsky’s Thème original et variations, Rachmaninov’s Barcarolle from the seven Morceaux de salon, and another barnstorming closing item in the form of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2. The producers retain a full 40 seconds of enthusiastic applause after the final encore (Chopin’s Tarantelle).

In short, this nicely presented quintet of discs (they fit into a cardboard sleeve with a spine barely wider than a regular jewel case) is a curate’s egg: Cherkassky at his most capricious, often out of sorts and below par, but always able to conjure up magical and, yes, memorable performances at the toss of a coin.