Richard Saxel’s programme takes its title from Janácek’s On an Overgrown Path, and here and in Schumann and MacDowell he makes a haunting claim for intimacy, reminding you of Goethe’s belief that greatness often lies in the lyric rather than the epic. Never less than stylish and affectionate, he recreates Janácek’s bleak and desolating vision – the music of one of music’s truest originals – with every note to be played “as if dipped in blood” (Janácek). He is fully sensitive to the nagging rhythm and insistence on pain in “In tears” yet responds with equal sympathy to the more innocent, less heavily charged world of Schumann’s Waldszenen and MacDowell’s Woodland Sketches.

Not that either composer is without his sinister moments. Schumann’s “Verrufene Stelle” in particular speaks of dusky red flowers that get their colouring from dead men’s blood (a foretaste here of the darker side of German Romanticism evoked in Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony) while MacDowell, less dramatically, tells us of a clearly sad plight in his “From an Indian Lodge”. There is strong competition in the Schumann (Richter, Pires and Volodos) and Janácek (Firkusny, Crossley and Andsnes), but to anyone who warms to introspection presented with an enviable taste and clarity this recital is outstanding. Saxel is finely recorded, his own notes reflect his intimacy with music he clearly cherishes and Quartz’s opening essay generously quotes no fewer than eight poets in four paragraphs.