Lazar Berman, a bear of a man whom The Times of London called ‘one of the last unabashed exponents of the Romantic tradition of Russian pianism’, was known for the power of his playing and for his prodigious technique, but was also capable of great delicacy at the keyboard. The core of his repertoire was the great Romantic and post-Romantic works, from Beethoven to Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Emil Gilels referred to him as a ‘phenomenon of the musical world’. Eloquence presents his complete Deutsche Grammophon recordings over five titles.

Berman’s recording of Liszt’s complete Années de Pèlerinage has been one of the reference recordings of the work since it was made in 1977. Recorded in Munich’s Alter Herkulessaal, the sound affords plenty of opportunity to appreciate Berman’s breathtaking sense of detail, and yet his visionary perspective ensures that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, that the individual pieces in each ‘journey’ are shaped into a whole experience.

The coupling, making up the fourth disc in this set, is much lesser known: the first release on CD of Berman’s 1961 recordings of Funérailles and the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9 as well as the truly astonishing 1965 versions of six of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert lieder.