Rubinstein remains the most elegant and life-affirming of all great Chopin pianists, his patrician ease and stylistic distinction the envy and despair of lesser mortals. Above all he understood a central paradox, that Chopin was in love with the human voice yet sensing the limitation of words and a single vocal line confided his deepest, most fiery and intimate thoughts to the piano, an instrument of a supposed percussive limitation. No pianist has played Chopin with a more translucent and uncluttered tone, with a greater sense of singing ‘line’, of vocal breathing and inspiration. His rubato was personal and inimitable, a subtle bending of the phrase, an ebb and flow. Above all there was his sovereign naturalness. Audiences felt transported, indeed transfigured by his playing. Able to identify with his overall nature and spirit they also heard their own humble aspirations and lives transcended. As my long-cherished children’s encyclopaedia put it, ‘when Rubinstein plays Chopin, you are carried into another world’.

And so you are in these wondrous performances dating from 1959-60. True, there are tiny slips of finger and concentration (an amusing one in the Andante Spianato where at 4'04" he starts a descent in the wrong clef only to quickly right himself) yet they do nothing to qualify a sense of supreme mastery. In the Concerto where, despite a once traditional and disfiguring cut in the opening tutti, he is memorably partnered by Giulini, Rubinstein achieves a flawless balance between Chopin’s ever-elusive mix of poise and intensity. In his recital his reading of the great C minor Mazurka surely numbers among the greatest of all Chopin performances in its play of light and shade, of brio and introspection. How consummate, too, is Rubinstein’s clarity and expression in the Op 10 No 6 Etude, his poetic suppleness the reverse of burdened or tortuous. He is deeply questing in No 9 with its cries and echoes (unique in Chopin) and ends the jocular No 8 with an exultant confirmation rather than a shy retreat from all that has gone before. Here is a more than tantalising glimpse of his frustratingly incomplete cycle of the Chopin Etudes.

But all these performances are memorable, haunting one over the years and now, thankfully, available in beautifully remastered sound. In the words of a New York Times critic writing in 1951, ‘Rubinstein was a romantic pianist who consistently avoided the showy elements of romanticism. He never breaks a line or a rhythm…he has brilliance without nonsensical virtuosity, logic without pedantry, tension without neurosis.’ All this, together with his personal magic and charisma, made him the most beloved of all pianists.