This first of three discs of Walter Gieseking’s pre-war concerto recordings documents a period when his repertoire was a good deal wider than it became in later years. Gieseking first became known for his unusually wide palette of tone and dynamics during the 1920s, with a “pianissimo [which] now and then becomes as nearly nothing as is possible to imagine…”, and by the 1950s he was acknowledged as one of the finest interpreters of Mozart, Debussy and Ravel. This Naxos re-issue includes one of Gieseking’s rarest recordings, the early 1940s Dresden recording of the Schumann Concerto, only ever released in Germany.