Here is cause for triple celebration: first of enterprise, secondly of what Tureck, in her trenchant and dazzling notes, calls the past, present and future bible of Western music and, thirdly, a performance of a matchless wit, musical grace and eloquence. Here is playing as vivid and life-affirming as any on record, a magical interaction of scholarship and imaginative brio. Such playing exposes the limitations of more self-consciously rarefied and erudite offerings (the alternately endearing and infuriating, disfiguring and illuminating whims and wiles of Glenn Gould spring to mind), distilling her hard-won insights into a musical Elysium.
Tureck can conjure a mystical stillness (try the First Prelude, for her proving either 'very simple or as mysterious as Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa') or a corruscating play of light and shade, of crescendos and decrescendos that can make the plain-sailing of others seem tentative and inadequate, and much time-honoured wisdom and tradition stale and archaic (the Third Prelude from Book 1). Here is no 'old wig' but a voice of timeless richness and vitality, one that made Schoenberg declare Bach to be 'the first 12-tone composer'. The devotional flow of the 22nd Prelude in B flat minor is offered with an immaculate and indeed phenomenal pianistic authority - a prime example of Rudolf Serkin's timely reminder that you can never have enough technique - and a mastery that allows for a total artistic liberation and unimpeded way to the music's very heart or poetic essence. In each unfailing instance the precise weight and timbre of every polyphonic strand seems to have been sifted and defined a hundred times only to be resolved into a dialogue or continuum as natural as it is piquant and thought-provoking. So far from being abstract, each work emerges new-minted as a tone-poem expressing every shade of radiance and darkness, a timeless reflection of music's most richly humane spirit.
Early in her career Rosalyn Tureck replaced a highly successful, if more conventional, concert career with a single-minded devotion to a composer who for her makes all others dispensable. Skilfully remastered, lavishly illustrated and annotated, such work is beyond price, deserving, in the words of that most august publication The Record Guide, 'a heavenful of stars'.'