I t was just a couple of weeks ago that Stephen Kovacevich and I were last in contact. He was in hospital, recovering from a hip operation, and we were talking about Hiromi , and where the latest generation of pianists were coming from. The players who had the brilliance, fire and commitment to the moment that his favourite players had: Vladimir Horowitz, Sergei Rachmaninov – his greatest of the greats – and his friend and occasional mentee, Yuja Wang.

Among other things, he told me about a Charles Munch performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique he had discovered on YouTube that made him exclaim: “How the hell did he get an orchestra to play like that?” Conversation with Stephen was always like that: utterly intense, totally opinionated, with the feeling that the spirits he was talking about, whether performers or composers from Chopin to Beethoven to Brahms to Mozart to Bach, were in the room with you, conjured into being as real, passionate people and presences.

Which was, of course, what you felt…