A BBC ex-colleague of mine once suffered a rap over the knuckles for describing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, on air, as being “what Mr. and Mrs. Goldberg got up to on their wedding night”. Had the ‘powers that were’ at the Beeb of the day heard Vikingur Ólafsson’s 2023 recording of the Goldbergs (DG 4864553, c£12.75) they might have nodded in agreement. The serene ‘aria’ itself might be heard as prayers under the chuppah (a symbol of God’s presence at a Jewish wedding) before Ólafsson suggests an energetic sense of play with the first variation then proceeds through the succeeding 30, brilliantly (try Variation 5 on track 6), argumentatively, dreamily, analytically (the right hand definitely knows what the left is doing), poetically, contemplatively, songfully, and with a mindful understanding of what every voice is up to. Furthermore repeats virtually always deviate from first-time performances of any given variation, whether by strengthening the left hand, modifying rubato or accentuating a staccato accompaniment. I love the way beyond the celebrated ‘Black Pearl’ Variation (No.25, nearly ten minutes as played by Ólafsson) the sequence rushes breathlessly towards the crowning ‘Quodlibet’. Numerous other Goldbergs arrest our attention in different ways – think of Klara Würtz, Rosalyn Tureck and of course Glenn Gould (my preference is for his 1981 recording) – and while remaining loyal to those versions also, Ólafsson’s fresh-minted approach re-awakens the excitement I felt when I first heard this wonderful music sixty or more years ago. Do at the very least give it a try.

An even more ethereal aspect of Bach unravels at the close of his ultimate fugal masterpiece The Art of Fugue, the final fugue left unfinished at the top of a heavens-bound musical stairway. Why? Was he distracted away from completing it (the probable reason) or did he simply not live long enough to finish the job? Various efforts to take it forwards on his behalf have ventured this way or that but perhaps the most adventurous is Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica which is the joint-musical centrepiece of Igor Levit’s Fantasia album (Sony Classical 19658811642, 2 cds, c£16.75), where Busoni takes his place alongside Bach pure and simple (a tiptoeing version of the celebrated ‘Air’ and the improvisatory Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue) and the other ‘biggie’, Liszt’s B minor Sonata where rather than storming the keys or rushing his fences Levit concentrates on musical structure and harmonic architecture. Try the grand Andante sostenuto section on disc one, track five, from say 2:44 and you could as well be listening to Beethoven. He tails this greatest of Romantic monoliths with Liszt’s humbling visitation on what’s perhaps the most terrifying of all German lieder, Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger. And there’s Alban Berg’s 12-minute Sonata Op. 1 opens with the sort of smoky eroticism that recalls, in its effect, Wagner’s Tristan Prelude. Always with Levit there’s something to learn, a telling connection (or connections) that you never made before.

If Bach via Busoni takes us skywards then Gabriel Faure’s late Nocturnes and Barcarolles (played by Marc-André Hamelin on a Hyperion double featuring the complete sets of both, 2 CDs, CDA68331-2, c£23.40) give the sensation of gravity being turned off for the duration, releasing terra firma’s hold so we float upwards into the ether. Try Nocturnes No. 9, or 10,  or from 4:05 into the 7^th and witness the soundscapes that we pass while soaring skywards, Fauré ever the narrator of contrapuntal intricacies, Hamelin adept at seeing between and beyond the phrases as well as charting the whole with consummate expertise. Not since Germaine Thyssens-Valentin (Testament) have I heard Fauré playing of such subtlety and conviction.