Irene Scharrer was the soloist on one of the best-selling classical 78s of all time: the Scherzo from Litolff’s Concerto symphonique conducted by her friend Sir Henry Wood. Her recording of it, made in October 1933, was also her last. What a puzzle. She slipped from view after the war, gave her last public performance in 1958 (a Mozart Two-Piano Sonata with her lifelong friend and fellow Matthay pupil Myra Hess) and died in 1971.

More comprehensive than Pearl’s 1992 survey (7/94) and in much better transfers, these two CDs contain all but one title of Scharrer’s complete recorded repertoire, though not her two earliest sides dating from 1909. Her playing is a revelation and shows her to be a far more charismatic player than her distant cousin Harriet Cohen, another Matthay pupil. What charm and brio, what joie de vivre! If the fingers sometimes run away with themselves with an occasional loss of detail, who can possibly object in the face of such uninhibited, joyous bravura? There is as much pleasure to be had from hearing her in unfamiliar repertoire (the Purcell and Boyce arrangements) as there is in hearing her individual voicing and phrasing of old favourites, in her exuberant dispatch of Paradies’s Toccata, the organ-like sonority she brings to Mendelssohn’s Andante, the exultant peroration of Chopin’s B flat minor Scherzo and the tongue-in-cheek humour in her selection of five of the 14 Variations on ‘Tipperary’ by Eton schoolmaster AM Goodhart.

Pianophiles will buy this set as a matter of course, even those who find it difficult to hear the work of a great artist beneath the sonically challenged swish of the 15 acoustic sides from 1912-24. With APR’s superior annotation and booklet, this is an invaluable release.