Every so often a pianist comes forward, albeit tentatively, suggesting that we have another listen to Mendelssohn’s Lieder ohne Worte, the most numerous of all his piano works, pieces that more or less define that pejorative, ‘salon music’. Often, we listen to this thrice familiar music, staple of piano anthologies, rites of passage to apprentice pianists, with half an ear and go on about more pressing business. Olga Pashchenko, however, has devoted an entire disc, titled ‘Guess Who?’, to 30 pieces by Felix Mendelssohn and his older, brilliantly gifted sister Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, played on a magnificent 1836 piano by Conrad Graf from the Geelvinck Collection, restored by Gijs Wilderom. Pashchenko doesn’t suggest we give this music another hearing; she demands it, wholeheartedly, compellingly and successfully.

R Larry Todd, the great biographer of both Mendelssohns, tells us that the origins of Songs without Words, or simply ‘Songs for Piano’, as Fanny called hers, remains a mystery. It may have derived from a game the siblings played as children. But surely these pieces have never sounded more like songs with only the text missing than they do in Pashchenko’s vivid yet never overstated performances. Filled with fantasy and imagination, they are presented in small groups – three by Felix, four by Fanny – carefully chosen to achieve both variety and continuity.

Pashchenko’s absolute mastery of this 1836 Graf, built during the maker’s peak period between 1822 and 1842, plays a significant role in these performances’ brilliance. The strikingly different sounds of the registers, a quality that has been lost in modern instruments, open fresh realms of colours and moods. These performances are an eloquent plea for the restoration of Felix to that quadrumvirate, born between 1809 and 1811, including Chopin, Schumann and Liszt, who rendered the piano the instrument par excellence of Romanticism. They also enhance our grasp of Fanny’s genius, even yet not fully understood.

And taking up the challenge of the disc’s title, ‘Guess Who?’, I think it’s easy: Felix is the more muscular and rushed, Fanny the more ardent and graciously unfolding. See if you agree with me.