This year’s disc of highlights from last year’s 31st Husum Festival (2017) showcases nine pianists playing the works of some 20 composers. The joy of these annual compilations is not the geekish delight of comparing the tempo and phrasing of one pianist’s Beethoven slow movement with the performance of the same movement by another pianist, but of delving into the bottomless and inexhaustible treasure trove of the piano’s literature. It is for some mysterious reason – made even more mysterious now by the easy access online to virtually any score – one that is still explored by only a small proportion of the professional pianistic community.

So let us salute those who think outside the box and have been invited to Husum to reveal those discoveries that have excited them. Pianists like the brilliant Italian-American Antonio Pompa-Baldi, who opened his recital with Czerny’s La ricordanza Variations, made famous (though slightly abbreviated) by Vladimir Horowitz. What a daring choice with which to open a recital – but here it is in all its frothy, dancing, bubbling gaiety, the prelude to an outstanding recital which included Pompa-Baldi’s own transcription of Poulenc’s Les chemins de l’amour. Here, too, is the great Marc-André Hamelin playing his completion of a recently discovered unfinished Chopin-Godowsky study (the Nouvelle étude No 1 in F minor), and his own quite fearsomely challenging Toccata on L’homme armée, commissioned as the set piece for the 2017 Van Cliburn International Competition.

I urge you to hear the young Russian-Lithuanian Lukas Geniušas in excerpts from a riveting – and, for this listener, revelatory – performance of Hindemith’s Ludus tonalis. Old-school charm and tonal finesse come from Husum veteran Daniel Berman. In fact the only performance here below par is Satu Paavola’s stultifyingly dull rendering of Thalberg’s Fantasy (so-called) on ‘Casta diva’.

This year’s selection has, for a change, a booklet (candid, charming and in occasionally idiosyncratic English) by the disc’s co-producer Jesper Buhl. As he says – and as this disc vividly demonstrates – ‘Husum is the perfect antidote for the jaded keyboard palette’.