Nino Gvetadze’s name is new to me. I missed her previous three solo CDs of Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov and Liszt but a Dutch critic speaks of her as ‘a born pianist, gifted with the ability to speak to the heart’. So I turned first to the final track on the disc to see if her ‘Clair de lune’ spoke to mine. It did.

The Steinway she uses is beautifully voiced and regulated – you can almost hear the felts brush the strings – but not recorded so intimately that it can’t breathe. Those soft low bass notes in ‘La cathédrale engloutie’, for example, are full, rich and round, a performance, by the way, in which she conveys magically Debussy’s peu à peu sortant de la brume marking. The two Arabesques that open the disc confirm a pianist who understands and can convey the sensuousness of Debussy (try tr 16, ‘La soirée dans Grenade’). Not for Gvetadze the chilly, objective view of some pianists. In the Préludes, Book 1, she has technique to spare in ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ and impish charm in ‘La danse de Puck’, though perhaps the ‘Minstrels’ could have strutted more jauntily.

As a result of the pianist’s project to awaken musical interest in children, more than 200 of them submitted to her drawings inspired by the Debussy she played to them (the back inlay of the disc reproduces some of the pictures). I’m not surprised. This is story-telling of beguiling intimacy.