There are some artists who have the unteachable gift of turning the simplest, most ordinary and even third-rate music into gold. In the past, one thinks of Kreisler and Tauber and their myriad recordings of short, encore-type pieces which can sometimes catch you unawares and leave you with a lump in your throat – or, indeed, a smile on your face.

Such a one is Tine Thing Helseth. Whatever she’s got, I’d like some too. Lockdown has inspired a number of artists to return to the music of their childhood – their adult comfort food – and this is a programme of 25 morceaux for which the Norwegian trumpeter has a particular affection, many of which are less than two minutes in length. Even Charpentier’s Te Deum and Clarke’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’ are shortened to 1'21" and 1'23" respectively. These and other popular, perky pieces from the 17th and 18th centuries are given the kind of performances that have you involuntarily conducting in your armchair, and provide a jaunty contrast with sequences of mainly elegiac works by Grieg, Mendelssohn, that old favourite ‘Trad’, and little-known Norwegian composers.

Trumpet and organ is one of music’s great natural partnerships (I say ‘trumpet’; in fact during the course of the recording Helseth uses a Yamaha Chicago C trumpet, Scherzer rotary piccolo trumpet and Yamaha flugelhorn) and, the superb quality of the sound engineering aside, it is the contribution of Kåre Nordstoga, organist of Oslo Cathedral (where the recording was made) who shares the laurels with Helseth. His judicious choices of registration are models of taste and refined musicality, bright reeds in the Baroque numbers (we also hear a particularly sympathetic one in the lovely Koppången by Per-Erik Moraeus) with tonally warm 16-foot pedal stops underpinning the mellow lyrical pieces, neither intrusive nor self-effacing.

I have no idea if Helseth and Nordstoga are regular recital partners but on this evidence, musically at least, they sound as though they are joined at the hip. ‘The melodies [on this album] are like a thread’, writes Helseth in the booklet. ‘There is nothing as difficult to play as a really simple melody – a simple, unadorned, honest melody coming from within. It’s magic!’ In the hands of these two musicians, it is indeed.