Michelle Assay was full of enthusiasm for the first two volumes of Norma Fisher’s BBC broadcasts. Here’s a musician who really has suffered for her art, the neurological condition focal dystonia putting paid to her performing career several decades early. This is the same devastating ailment that afflicted Leon Fleisher and Gary Graffman and, in the notes, she likens it to ‘putting a tight glove on your hand that doesn’t fit’. Now in her early 80s, she has created for herself a second career as a world-renowned teacher, and it’s a pity that no one thought to record her commercially.

All the better, then, to have these BBC broadcasts, lovingly assembled by Sonetto Classics, spearheaded by producer and CEO Tomoyuki Sawado. The sources are not the original BBC recordings since, as Sawado tactfully explains in the fascinating booklet, ‘the BBC did not preserve most of her recordings’. Fortunately, thanks to a combination of cassettes, reel-to-reel tapes and even a DAT (this is a veritable dance through the technology of time), she can be heard again. All of this I discovered after listening, not wanting to prejudice my ears.

The Schumann and Brahms come from a broadcast of July 1984 and common to both is a narrative sweep, the work of an artist not afraid to conjure big soundscapes. She responds with vividness to the mercurial shifts of Papillons, launching into it with a songfulness and a bubbling sense of energy. And if, occasionally, things sound a little overplayed – the stompy octaves of No 3, for example – it makes for a still greater contrast with the airiness of No 4 or the deliciously graceful No 5. Her technique wants for nothing in numbers such as the Prestissimo of No 9, while the finale combines a no-nonsense pace with moments of impishness and a longing that fade beautifully into nothing.

She is unafraid of the vehemence and angst of Brahms’s Op 116 Fantasies, though I found the sheer weight of the outer Capriccios brought back memories of the kind of playing that put me off this composer for decades. Much more conducive, to my ears at least, is the more inward, more troubled writing, which she reveals with great imagination, the A minor Intermezzo (No 2), for instance, having a rapt intensity, while she brings alive the withdrawn hesitancy of the central E major Intermezzo, even if I wanted more sense of the intimissimo sentimento of the following piece.

The Chopin collection from October 1992 is an edgier experience. Fisher begins with two mazurkas: Op 68 No 1 sounds a little too percussive, while Op 41 No 1 has a relentless quality that may be intentional but may also be down to the condition that would end her career just months later. To the C sharp minor Nocturne, Op 27 No 1, she brings a Brahmsian burnished colouring, rising to a heartfelt climax. The Écossaises offer a moment of wonderful lightness and playfulness before the closing Berceuse, tender and inward. Poignantly, these were her last recordings for the BBC.