Until recently, my experience of Artur Schnabel as composer was limited to the stylistic disconnect of the cadenzas to his Mozart concertos, with one exception. Almost 20 years to the day after his death, a group of his pupils gathered in New York for a memorial concert at Lincoln Center. Helen and Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Claude Frank, Frank Glazer, Lili Kraus, Tung Kwong-Kwong, Eunice Norton and Beveridge Webster played concertos for two and three pianos by Bach and Mozart. Leon Fleisher conducted Schnabel’s Duodecimet for mixed chamber ensemble, a late piece that, to my teenage ears, sounded so difficult as to be virtually impenetrable.

Thanks to the intrepid Jenny Lin, we now have an overview of Schnabel’s piano music. Lin’s artistry is informed by a curiosity as voracious as it is insatiable. She is also a pianist of the first calibre, with a rock-solid, multivalent technique that serves a richly cultivated imagination. Who knows? She may be just the person to rescue Schnabel’s piano music from the obscurity in which it has languished, virtually since its creation. How could a performer as forward-thinking, perceptive, provocative and widely influential as Schnabel fail to be interesting as a composer as well?

If the earlier works, those up to about 1920, suggest no new paths, they are nevertheless charmingly ingratiating and idiomatically conceived for the instrument. Three Fantasy Pieces, Schnabel’s first published music, originated while he was still a pupil of Leschetizky, to whom they are dedicated. Along with the Three Piano Pieces, Op 15, composed eight years later, they are strongly influenced by Brahms, though a droll sense of humour marks them as uniquely Schnabel’s own.

Things start to get really interesting with the Dance Suite (1921) and the formidable Sonata (1923). Although all five movements of the Sonata are composed without bar lines, indications for tempo, dynamics and expression are abundant (and will surprise no one with a nodding acquaintance of Schnabel’s edition of the Beethoven sonatas). Its advanced harmonic language and strong expressive power suggest that it may be, of all these works, most worthy of revival. Piece in Seven Movements from the mid-1930s and the 1947 Seven Piano Pieces advance and extend the abstract expressionist frontiers of the Sonata.

Of course, a full-scale revaluation of Schnabel’s creative output presupposes familiarity with all his music. And there’s a great deal of it – three symphonies, other orchestral works including a piano concerto, five string quartets, a piano quintet, a piano trio, a string trio, a sonata for violin and piano, two solo sonatas, one each for violin and cello, and many highly effective songs. Lin’s imaginative interpretations make a strong case for the continued viability of Schnabel’s music for the instrument he understood so well.