The three Scarlatti sonatas in this collection of Michelangeli’s recordings were supposedly taped in his home in the mid-sixties. The remainder of the recordings gathered here date from the seventies onward.

His 1971 account of Beethoven’s Opus 7 sonata has all the characteristics of his typical refinement of detail in order to reveal a work’s larger structure. Brahms was twenty-one when he composed his four Ballades. Of them all, the first, based on a Scottish ballad, is the most effulgently romantic. The quiet opening suggests the mother’s troubled questions and the son’s furtive replies. In the Allegro, in the tonic major, the full horror of the parricide emerges.

Debussy’s three Images are selected from the two books composed for piano. The first and third of them evoke water, reflections on its shimmering surface and goldfish swimming in it, respectively. The second evokes moonlight reflected on a ruined temple. Children’s Corner was intended for Debussy’s daughter, nicknamed Chouchou. The last piece in the set, Golliwog’s Cake Walk is famous not only for its infectiousness but also for a famous spoof of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in its middle section.

To one commentator, the works of Chopin “came from Michelangeli’s fingers so bright and shiny and exciting that they might have been written yesterday.” The four works included here appeared regularly on his recital programs.

Schumann’s “Viennese Carnival Prank,” the earliest recording in this collection, has been a celebrated part of Michelangeli’s discography four almost half a century. The Schubert A minor Sonata, like the other items included here, reveals his quest to rise, as described by Karl Heinz Ruppel, “to the highest and brightest realms of intellectual clarity, where music is ultimately located as a logically coherent and aesthetically definitive form.”