Even at a time when the world was deluged by great touring virtuoso pianists, Josef Hofmann stood out from the crowd as someone of very special gifts both technically and musically. He had been born in Poland in 1876 to a family of professional musicians, had mastered the basics of music by the age of three and gave his first professional concert at the Warsaw Opera House two years later. By the age of nine he was touring Europe including performances of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto in London and Berlin. Two years later he was in the United States beginning a tour that would include eighty concerts performing four times per week. He astounded his audiences, but the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children stopped the tour, and an unknown benefactor paid his father a considerable sum of money on the understanding that Josef would never again appear in public until he was eighteen. That allowed more years of study before again launching his career. When he did so, he was again placed on the treadmill of numerous appearances in every part of the world, the tremendous success of one of his many tours of the United States in 1924 persuading him to make his home there. These recordings, made in New York over the period 1916 to 1923, show that Hofmann was a genius. Just sample the Liszt Tarantella, Venezia e Napoli  to hear some of the most stunning piano playing placed on disc. At times his immense gifts did tempt him to employ tempos that exceeded the composer’s intention, yet the group of six Chopin pieces show a pianist of innate musicality, delicacy and an ability to bring a personal shape to the music that does not transgress the music’s intent. Above all it was his ability to make every note of crystalline and detailed quality however fast the piece. It was a gift he would pass to his pupil Shura Cherkassky. The disc contains 20 tracks, and in addition to Chopin and Liszt we hear Schubert, Mendelssohn, Moszowski, Paderewski and Rachmaninov. They were recorded in the ‘acoustic era’, the restoration engineer, Mark Obert-Thorn, creating a sound that would be acceptable to those wedded to modern digital recordings. In one word ‘remarkable’.