Look at the close-ups on any YouTube video of Tatyana Nikolaieva’s pianism and you will see on full display the depth of touch, the legato weight-transfer and the shaping of phrases inculcated by the school of Alexander Goldenweiser, which also produced the likes of Lazar Berman, Ginzburg, Feinberg, Bashkirov and my own teacher, Sulamita Aronovsky. In Nikolaieva’s case those qualities were allied to a personality of exceptional purity, generosity and creative intelligence, as anyone fortunate enough to have met and conversed with her (as I did) will confirm. Admittedly not every recording showed her at her imperious best, but this one, given in the spectacular outdoor arena of the Herodes Atticus Odeon in Athens four years before her death, certainly does.

If fully projected large-auditorium concert-piano Bach is not your thing, then of course you would need to skip the first eight tracks. Having said that, in its contrapuntal and architectural clarity, the three-part Ricercar from The Musical Offering is a model of its kind, and the E flat French Suite is simply joyous, thanks to its unfailing energy, perfectly weighted touch and beautifully imagined layering of texture and dynamics. Count the half-dozen or so mis-hits along the way if you will, but surely only an unswervingly anti-big-piano-Bach listener would want to.

It’s possible that some recorded performance has matched Nikolaieva’s for noble shaping of the theme of Schumann’s Symphonic Studies. But I have to say that none comes to mind. She stays in the zone for the next half-dozen variations, any passing blemishes being washed aside by passionate identification with Schumann’s world of feeling. Perhaps the fortissimos here are more mighty than they would need to be in a studio, but as in any top-notch orchestral brass section there is never a suspicion of roughness. Only after the single posthumous variation, placed after Etude No 8, did my mental notes contain a few question marks: for instance over her surprisingly steady and still not entirely comfortable Presto possibile Ninth Etude, the degree of fallibility in No 10 and the narrow failure to clinch the high points in the mighty finale. Still, for sheer eloquence, the only live account of the Symphonic Studies I can put alongside Nikolaieva’s would be Cherkassky’s – quite different, of course, in its Puckish playfulness – from his 80th-birthday recital at the Carnegie Hall (Decca, 1/93).

The two movements from Miroirs might not be for everyday listening, symphonically projected as they are, but they still left me longing to hear Nikolaieva in the entire set. Of the shorter items that conclude the recital, the highlights for me are Borodin’s proto-Impressionist ‘In the Monastery’ and the delectably coloured Prokofiev Prelude. Applause overlaps the final cadences of most of the items but is then disconcertingly trimmed. Overall, though, the recording quality is exceptional, sacrificing nothing of the sense of occasion that emanates from the playing. As a first release, this is quite a discovery.