If in Blake’s immortal aphorism “exuberance is beauty”, then you need look no further than Bridge’s two-CD issue of Nadia Reisenberg’s 1947 Carnegie Hall recital. And throughout her richly comprehensive programme you are left wondering when you last had a more life-affirming or enriching musical and, above all, human experience.

An all-Russian virtuoso in both temperament and technique, Reisenberg (1904-83) was an indelible personality who played in the grandest of grand traditions. Her Mozart may be sufficiently pliable and romantic to raise the eyebrows of those accustomed to a more conservative, less generous-hearted musicianship. But her “line” has all the flexibility and warmth of a great singer, while in Weber she relishes every one of the composer’s teeming notes. Her Chopin, as on her previous “Chopin Treasury” album (2/09), lives and breathes with an imaginative freedom that always transcends mere display. At the same time I doubt whether many pianists could match her astonishing fleetness but always musically motivated dexterity in the Third Sonata’s Scherzo or the dizzying momentum in “that great and equestrian finale”. Her Barber Excursions are a glowing and dazzling tribute to her adopted America and in a selection of Scriabin Etudes she throws caution to the winds: indeed, caution is hardly a word in her musical vocabulary. For encores there is more Chopin, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Tchaikovsky’s In the Village, which Gary Graffman in his moving accompanying tribute describes as “enchanting in its Russianness”. Many thanks, then, to all those who made this issue possible and for Bridge for rescuing a great and unique artist from relative obscurity.