The annual disc of highlights from the previous year’s Festival of Piano Music Rarities from Husum has, as usual, arrived just in time for the start of the present year’s week-long delve into the piano’s bottomless treasure chest. Every year, founder/artistic director Peter Froundjian and Danacord CEO Jesper Buhl are faced with the difficult task of choosing representative excerpts from the recitals of all nine pianists invited to play. Not easy. And some pianists’ live performances translate to disc better than others. While the disc of the 36th Festival, recorded between August 12 and 20, 2022, has no lost masterpieces, there are several wonderful discoveries and unusual encores to be enjoyed. The heroic Matthias Kirschnereit, who stood in at a few hours’ notice due to a cancellation, opens proceedings with Beethoven. Contrary to common belief, the music of famous composers is most welcome at Husum – on condition that the piece is not well known. Who has heard his Polonaise in C, Op 89 (1802) ever played in a concert? The Ukrainian Vadym Kholodenko offers unfamiliar Schubert and a featherlight Bagatelle by Kyiv-born Valentin Silvestrov (b1937).

The longest work (13'53") is the (theme and nine) Variations on a Well-Known Tune written in 1946 by the Polish pianist and composer Ignace Strasfogel (1909 94), who can’t make up his mind whether to be humorous, erudite or didactic in his series of treatments of ‘Home on the range’. Interesting to hear once. The pieces I shall return to are the beautiful Romance sans paroles by Mel Bonis (played by Nicolas Stavy) and her almost exact contemporary Cécile Chaminade, whose late (1914) Au pays dévasté shows a very different side to the composer of Automne.

Festival favourite Nadejda Vlaeva unearths a vivacious movement from Friedrich Gulda’s Play Piano Play, while Husum debutant Paul Guinery’s unique programme of novelty music by British and Irish composers is represented here by Bax and Billy Mayerl. The undoubted primus inter pares star of the collection is the Italian-American virtuoso Antonio Pompa-Baldi. I would buy this release just to hear him in the Andante appassionato by the Chilean composer Enrique Soro Barriga (1884-1954), the hair-raising first Studio da concerto, Op 31, by Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli (1882-1949) and the pianist’s own improvisation on Charlie Chaplin’s tune ‘Smile’.

A genial and useful booklet from Jesper Buhl is the cherry on top, leaving one to wonder once again why nowhere else has followed the Husum model and its week of sell-out concerts.