Originally on Ivory Classics, this glorious two-CD album is now lavishly reissued to mark Nadia Reisenberg’s 110th anniversary. A voice from another age, Reisenberg (1905 82) makes it difficult to imagine a more unsullied, unimpeded musicianship backed by pianism of superfine quality. True to her Russian roots, she never invests Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov’s miniatures with a weight beyond their often slender but in her hands entrancing worth. For Reisenberg her ultimate aim was for a distilled simplicity, never for ‘originality’ for its own sake. Again, and more assertively, she felt she had no right to ‘meddle’ with music.

Tchaikovsky may have taken a dim view of his solo piano works (‘so many musical pancakes, quickly tossed and turned’) but in Reisenberg’s hands they emerge as so much more than salon charmers. The opening Etude makes for a dazzling curtain-raiser, the two Mazurkas provide piquant memories of Chopin, and who can resist the once popular ‘Chant sans paroles’ when given with such warmth and affection? In Rachmaninov, too, you hear a seamless Russian legato and beauty of sound, with the virtuoso intricacies of the Polka de WR tossed aside as child’s play. In the first recording outside Russia of Kabalevsky’s 24 Preludes there is again much to wonder at, even in music by a composer too often in search of his own voice. Still, No 1 reminds us that Kabalevsky was capable of haunting beauty as well as facility, and Reisenberg’s brilliance in the whirling moto perpetuo of No 10 is superb. But her warmth and ease are everywhere and it is heartening to know that there is more to come. Production is lavish and includes a moving tribute by Robert Sherman, Nadia Reisenberg’s son.