Milstein’s interpretation of these difficult works is at once brilliant and satisfying – although because of its very brilliance it is not perhaps as deeply satisfying as Johanna Martzy’s. It depends rather on what you imagine to be the ideal surroundings for a performance: a public recital or your own room. The music itself seems to me capable of supporting both interpretations, for it combines the rhetoric of extreme technical difficulty with a richness of detail that seems to call for more intimacy than a recital-hall can give us. Perhaps the ideal performance would retain Martzy’s inwardness, but infuse it with a little of Milstein’s sheer physical vigour and impact. For him the technical difficulties hardly seem to exist, or rather, exist only as a stimulus to bravura; by her they are accepted as an essential, organic part of the music, a result of the complexity of Bach’s thought. I suppose one could generalize on the masculine and feminine approaches to music with this as one’s text, but I don’t feel tempted to do so. Nor do I feel tempted to plump dogmatically for one or the other as “best available version”. Both are exceptionally distin-guished presentations of music that is not nearly as austere as its reputation might suggest. I do suggest, though, that before buying either set it might be a good idea to sample both. Gramophone • From the original masters of Universal Music. • Audiophile analogue mastering by Rainer Maillard at Emil Berliner Studios. • 180g audiophile virgin vinyl pressed by Pallas Group GmbH in Germany. • LXT-2766