It’s fair to say that Orli Shaham is equally at home in the classical or the contemporary repertoire. A noted exponent of modern American composers like John Adams, she’s also a fine Bach interpreter, and in recent years has acquired a reputation for her playing of the late piano music of Johannes Brahms, thanks in part to the double CD Bach Inspired on Canary Classics that received a very warm welcome a couple of years ago in Limelight. Of course, nothing beats a live performance, and two years on Shaham’s interpretations are even finer, benefitting from a sense of communion with composer and audience, and a definite ‘lived in’ quality that is inevitably hard to capture on disc.

Shaham’s theory is that by interrogating a composer’s influential predecessors and throwing in 21st-century interpretations by a handful of today’s musical luminaries, an audience is granted an opportunity to eavesdrop on whispered conversations – composer to composer, as it were – across the centuries. And, as this smartly conceived, intelligently conveyed recital proves, it works. Beginning her odyssey with Bach – for Brahms, the most revered of the ‘ancients’ – Shaham proceeded by way of the great Op. 118 and Op. 119...