Hough. Litton. Rachmaninov concertos. Hyperion. Already a mouth-watering prospect, is it not? So, like the old Fry’s Five Boys chocolate advert, does Anticipation match Realisation in these five much-recorded confections?

The answer is ‘yes’ on almost every level. Culled from one or more live performances the concertos may be, but they manifest a real sense of occasion. Hough has clearly been burning to record these pieces for years. Litton is one of the world’s most adept accompanists. He and his Dallas players offer exemplary support with bright precision, purring strings and a judiciously blended brass section. With a handsomely voiced piano comes a near-perfect balance; only in the final pages of the studio-made Paganini Rhapsody does Hough struggle to make himself heard.

Unlike most of his peers, Hough takes the composer at his word (scores and recordings) in matters of tempi, dynamics and the performance practice of Rachmaninov’s musical language, as he makes clear in a trenchant apologia in the superb booklet-note (by David Fanning). Only once does he seriously part company. In the composer’s own 1924 and 1929 recordings of the Second Concerto, Rachmaninov adds (unmarked) accacciaturas to the famous opening bottom Fs, follows his own minim=66 and then shifts up a gear to minim=85 (also not in the score) for the big theme. Hough plays the accacciaturas as crotchets, having set off at minim =85 and ignores the marked ritardando. The effect sounds dismissive and ill-tempered.

I mention this in detail because it is puzzlingly uncharacteristic of everything else he does. There is so much to applaud: where Wild and Argerich seem glib in the cadenzas of the First and Third Concertos respectively, Hough imparts the right sense of heroic struggle; not even Rachmaninov caresses the second subject of the First Concerto’s finale so beguilingly; the notoriously tricky opening pages of the Second Concerto’s finale are dispatched with breathtaking élan, as is the last movement of the Third Concerto (listen to the delicious glissando at 00'32" and the phrasing of the molto espressivo theme at 6'13"); additionally, this recording of the Fourth Concerto is, so Hough believes, the first to include missing wind parts for bars 74-76 in the finale, parts corrected by Rachmaninov and heard only on the composer’s recording.

It is quite an achievement when each of Hough’s five performances here rival the greatest versions recorded individually by other pianists (the younger Horowitz in the Third, for example, Michelangeli in the Fourth). As a competitive set, that from the much-lamented Rafael Orozco comes close to matching Hough’s fleet-fingered ardour but is less impressively recorded; Howard Shelley offers a convincing, slower alternative with powerful, weighty tone. Overall, though, only Earl Wild (1965) and, before that, Rachmaninov himself truly convey the composer’s intentions with such miraculous fluency, passion and stylistic integrity.