What would we do without the annual Schloss vor Husum Festival? Here, pianists, known and unknown, gratefully gather to respond to the request for unusual offerings, to a timely reminder that the piano’s vast repertoire extends far beyond endless performances of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and Mussorsky’s Pictures. As the booklet-note has it, ‘Husum is the obvious place for a broad-minded public’. And here, in its 27th year, is a cornucopia of riches played in dazzling and superb style by pianists who can let their hair down and rejoice, free from alien criticism and commercial considerations.

Håvard Gimse gives us Tveitt’s Family Silver, music for those in love with the Arctic lights of a northern landscape. Then there is Sinding, and a timely reminder that he wrote much of romantic beauty and interest apart from The Rustle of Spring. Sibelius’s Sonata demands and receives from Jean-Frédéric Neuburger an outsize virtuosity, and in more Sibelius Henri Sigfridsson includes ‘Khadra’s Dance’, a beauty-and-the-beast work complete with menacing, bear-like tread. Ludmil Angelov could hardly be more glowing in a Chopin Mazurka, followed by Michałowski’s fervent and touching tribute to a composer who had died just two years before. Friedman’s Passacaglia is surprisingly sombre and powerful, and Cecile Licad’s performance of Leo Ornstein (the composer of Suicide in an Airplane) is of a mind-blowing brilliance. Finally, Artur Pizarro is elegant and seductive in two Korngold Fairy Tales, making you disagree with the American joke, ‘more Korn than Gold’. What more could you wish for?