I was delighted to be able to give a warm welcome to this pianist’s debut recording back in the long-ago pre-Covid world of August 2019. It’s not just that Isata Kanneh-Mason is a born musician with a virtuoso technique. It is her ability to engage your emotions from first note to last – and to think outside the box. Not for her another deadly tranche of over-recorded, mittel-European 19th-century repertoire but a fresh mix of American works and – what’s this? Mirabile dictu – four works by Coleridge-Taylor.

But to particulars, and Kanneh-Mason opens with a magically atmospheric account of the ‘Summertime’ section from Earl Wild’s Fantasy on Porgy and Bess, followed by his firecracker étude on ‘I got rhythm’ in which she comes as close as any to rivalling the American master’s nonchalant dexterity.

Barber’s Nocturne (his haunting ‘homage to John Field’) prefaces the linchpin of the recital: the same composer’s Sonata, a commissioned work paid for, let us not forget, by Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers. Among the front-runners of this remarkable and ferociously difficult (to play) work are Horowitz, Van Cliburn, Browning and Hamelin. Kanneh-Mason can join their illustrious company, for this is no mere studio recording with safety nets supplied but a thrilling, engrossing and illuminating account at every turn. Perhaps the most notable difference to the work’s premiere recording (apart from the recorded sound) is the Adagio’s theme, strongly projected by Horowitz but realised by Kanneh-Mason as more lyrical and integrated into the surrounding texture. She can thunder with the best of them, matching their speed (with the exception of Horowitz) and power in the feather-light Scherzo and formidable fugal finale, but it is her exquisitely produced pianissimos and dynamic shading throughout the work (and indeed the rest of the programme) that beguile the listener.

Gershwin follows this (Decca must surely let her record the piano-and-orchestra works), then Amy Beach’s By the Still Waters – this will make you hold your breath – and Copland’s comical ‘The Cat and the Mouse’. Now Coleridge-Taylor: first the premiere recording of his Intermezzo in B minor (if this was labelled ‘by Grieg’, everyone would have known it for years) and then three of his 24 Negro Melodies, Op 59. No 8 is ‘The Bamboula’, the same tune that Gottschalk used for his early success back in 1845; No 10 is ‘Deep River’. Kanneh-Mason’s performance moved me to tears. What more can I say?

A nod to recording producer Andrew Cornall and engineer Philip Siney, who have captured the Steinway piano in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall in an ideal ambience. ‘Summertime’ indeed, from a profound and greatly gifted artist who radiates warmth, joy and much-needed musical sunshine.