Driving through the Surrey village of Limpsfield the other day, I was reminded of one of those tricky moments from the days when I fronted a music magazine programme on the BBC World Service. The pianist Eileen Joyce, so the story went, used to match the colour of her dress to the mood of the music she was playing and, if she was giving two different concertos, changed during the interval. It seemed a good opening gambit for an interview, but Joyce said: 'It was simply because I sweated.' An alternative explanation, quoted in the booklet note to this fine five-CD set, is that her dress-changing was an antidote to stage fright, to stop herself 'shaking and biting my fingernails'.

But what is not in doubt is that Joyce was one of the most popular pianists of her day. Born in Tasmania, she was an English resident for decades, latterly living in Limpsfield until her death in 1991. She retired in the early Sixties, but not before she had played Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto on the soundtrack of David Lean’s Brief Encounter of 1945.

Whatever pressures she might have been under during her career, the quality that comes across in these performances is the sheer joy of playing. Joyce possessed a formidable technique and an interpretative mind that blended stylish sensibility with passion. More than 30 composers are represented on these excellent transfers, ranging from Bach and Mozart to Rachmaninoff, Skryabin and Shostakovich by way of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt, and including gems by Henselt, Sinding and Dohnányi that used to be common currency of the piano repertoire. Joyce’s breadth as well as her impeccable touch and distinctive artistic personality are valuably recalled here.