Marie Jaëll, Liszt claimed, had ‘the brains of a philosopher and the hands of an artist’. The subject of the latest Palazzetto Bru Zane Portrait, she was, by all accounts, a most remarkable woman. Born Marie Trautmann in Alsace in 1846, she began piano studies with Moscheles aged just seven and was fully established as a virtuoso by the time she was 20, when she married the Austrian pianist Alfred Jaëll. Five years later, she turned to composition: Franck and Saint-Saëns were her teachers, though Liszt, whom she idolised, later became something of a mentor. After 1894 she became comparatively reclusive, took up writing and taught a handful of pupils, among them Albert Schweitzer, at her house in Passy. She was fascinated by neuroscience: her publications include studies of the relationship between brain signals and body movements in performance, together with 11 volumes on her method of piano teaching. She died in 1925.

Her music is essentially high Romantic, and German rather than French in inspiration. Beethoven was an influence, as was Schumann: the two sets of miniatures she wrote for her pupils, Les beaux jours and Les jours pluvieux, invite comparisons with Kinderszenen. Though her contemporaries dubbed her ‘Lisztian’, she nowadays reminds us more of Brahms, who, ironically, didn’t care for her work. Her piano concertos – in D minor (1877) and C minor (1884) – have something of the weight and force of Brahms’s own D minor Concerto, and both push at stereotypical gender boundaries. Jaëll’s own playing was frequently considered ‘manly’ and the piano-writing is at times aggressive in its virtuosity. The C minor Concerto, in particular, is a tremendous work – brooding, impassioned and utterly remorseless in its logic and drama.

She could be variable. The 1878 song cycle La légende des ours, to her own text, deals with the stormy marriage between two bears (Alfred looks bear-like in his photos, one notices), but is too heavyweight to justify its designation as ‘chants humoristiques’. The Cello Concerto, with its exquisite slow movement, on the other hand, has a wonderfully compact refinement. The Douze Valses et Finale again sound Brahmsian, and Liszt’s influence only becomes genuinely dominant in Ce qu’on entend…, an austere three-part meditation on Dante’s Divine Comedy, which has something of the harmonic idiosyncrasy of La lugubre gondola: we’re only given extracts here, and could do with the whole thing.

It’s all magnificently done, though. The piano concertos, formidably played by David Violi (the C minor) and Romain Descharmes (D minor), also find Joseph Swensen on blistering form with his Lille orchestra. Hervé Niquet and the Brussels Philharmonic take over for La légende des ours and the Cello Concerto. Chantal Santon-Jeffrey is pushed a bit in the song-cycle, though Xavier Phillips plays the Cello Concerto with beguiling elegance. A roster of fine young pianists, meanwhile, share the remaining keyboard works. Lidija and Sanja Bizjak sound good on their period Erard in the Quatre Valses et Finale. Nicolas Stavy’s clear, pointillistic approach to Les jours pluvieux is preferable to Dana Ciocarlie’s muted way with Les beaux jours, and David Bismuth’s restrained yet expressive performance of Ce qu’on entend… haunts you long after the final chords have died away. It’s a fine survey of a fascinating composer.