VIEWED simply as a human interest story, the life of Joyce Hatto would be enough to commend her to readers normally deaf to the world of classical music.

Found to have cancer at the age of 41 and for her remaining 36 years rarely free from the disease, she offered hope by example to those similarly afflicted and was the longest-surviving cancer patient at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge. More remarkably, her illness re-energised a performing career which, although successful on its own terms, had so far not done full justice to her talents.

As a concert pianist during the 1950s and 1960s Hatto had championed the music of Chopin and Liszt when their full status was still to be recognised. In addition to her concerto appearances with conductors such as de Sabata, Beecham, Kletzki and Martinon and taming the often substandard pianos of the British musical circuit, she made adventurous tours of Russia, Scandinavia and Poland, taught painstakingly on an individual basis, and recorded — modestly and eclectically — for the budget label Saga, whose A&R manager was her husband, William Barrington-Coupe.

But the fateful diagnosis drastically reorientated her career. Unable to face the concert platform, she retreated to the Cambridge studio set up by Barrington-Coupe to bequeath to the discerning pianophile one of the most remarkable recording legacies of the 20th century. At the time of her death, some 120 CDs had been issued. Scandalously underpublicised, they traverse the cornerstones of the piano repertoire and document a singular artist of superlative technique and interpretation.

Pianism was in Hatto’s blood from a young age. Her father, who administered her first lessons, was a gifted amateur pianist. An early teacher was the sister of the composer Joseph Holbrooke, Marion, and at a Trinity College of Music grade examination she was encouraged by Sir Granville Bantock, who dubbed her a born performer. Encounters at the Royal Academy of Music proved less propitious, however, and deterred by its sexist ethos and the uncertainties of wartime she decided against enrolling there, preferring to seek out consultations with some of the acknowledged lions of the keyboard, including Benno Moiseiwitsch, Nicolai Medtner, Clara Haskil and Sviatoslav Richter.

One of the earliest was the Busoni student Serge Krisch, whose stories of the great 19th-century pianist-composers fired her imagination and ambition. Another was Alfred Cortot. She took the Chopin piano sonatas to him, and thereafter they often met at the National Gallery. His piano method, alongside Clementi’s Gradus ad Parnassum and Bach, constituted her daily bread and butter.

She made her London debut in 1952. Among her earliest enthusiasms was Liszt, whose transcendental demands held no terror for her: she made light of offering not one but both sets of études in a single programme but balked at doing the same for Chopin: “It is not that the undertaking is so daunting; it is certainly that, but it is a question of basic survival,” she remarked.

Another enthusiasm was Bax, and had not the composer’s mistress and muse, Harriet Cohen, intervened, Hatto would, with the composer’s blessing, have reintroduced the complex Symphonic Variations to the concerto repertoire. In the event, her EMI recording of a notoriously difficult work, which had been performed by Cohen in simplified form only, more than made up for the omission.

The discography she assembled latterly, surveying almost completely the piano works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, is a trusty Baedeker of the standard repertoire. But composers outside the Austro-German canon were not neglected: there is, naturally, much Chopin and Liszt, but also Scarlatti, Debussy, Prokofiev and her father’s beloved Rachmaninov. Moreover, this outstanding conspectus was capped by the summa of piano technique, Godowsky’s reworkings of Chopin’s études, tackled in their entirety by only the most fearless.

“You need to be as fast as the animals on the nature programmes on television,” she once said, although she was quick to point out that technique was always handmaiden to the great music in which her faith never wavered. Having studied composition with Mátyás Seiber and Hindemith, she was a genuinely creative interpreter, unimpressed by the fads of authentic performance or the urtext.

She loved her chosen instrument and the music it had inspired. She once said: “For me there is a frisson merely to see the sight of the piano open and standing alone on the concert platform — waiting for the pianist to appear, sit down and launch into the adventure of a performance.”

For Hatto, piano-playing was the triumph of mind over matter, something she also achieved in her life.

Her husband survives her.

Joyce Hatto, pianist, was born on September 5, 1928. She died on June 30, 2006, aged 77.