Claudio Arrau (1903-91) was described variously as ‘Prince’, ‘Emperor’, and ‘King’, of the keyboard, such was the awe in which he was held. Even more tellingly, he remarked: ‘When I play I am in ecstasy; that is what I live for’ – a comment gloriously relevant to this BBC Legends issue of performances given in 1959 and 1963.

Once phenomenally fleet, Arrau’s playing underwent a gradual sea change into an incomparable breadth and richness which, almost inevitably, became closely associated with Brahms’s Second. Here, every note and phrase is subjected to his intense but humane scrutiny. How typical is that rhetorical gesture at 7'09"; how novel and exploratory his voicing at 11'07", just before the passage where Tovey found ‘the air full of whisperings and the beating of mighty wings’; and how characteristic that refusal of all soft options at 16'55". True, Arrau could sometimes bear down on even the most innocent-seeming passage with an overwhelming intensity, but his rush of adrenalin at the close of the Allegro appassionato and the miracle of his stillness in the Andante’s più Adagio are things to haunt the imagination. 

Turning to the first of Schubert’s Klavierstücke, the central Andante is laden with significance; in the stormy central passage of the Allegretto his eschewal of a traditional but unmarked tempo change gives the music a despairing, heavily weighted quality. Again, you could say that in Brahms, Schubert – or, indeed, any composer – Arrau knew nothing of small talk, tirelessly, sometimes earnestly, seeking out the music’s innermost spirit. He is sympathetically matched in the Brahms by Sir Alexander Gibson, and these revelatory performances brought to mind the title of Graham Hough’s book on DH Lawrence, The Dark Sun; it could equally apply to Arrau.