Here is a disc to set the pulse racing. Nikolai Kapustin is a Russian composer who writes jazz piano music teeming with energetic spontaneity and bristling with the kind of creative immediacy one associates with improvisation (although the music is fully and meticulously written out). Kapustin is already known to the Hyperion catalogue through Steven Osborne’s trail-blazing recording of the first two Piano Sonatas and the Preludes in Jazz Style, and Marc-André Hamelin is another pianist who has for years played his music in concert. Hamelin’s legendary technical prowess and his exceptional affinity with jazz fuse to create one of the most sparkling, infectiously foot-tapping piano discs you could wish to hear.

In a recital spanning various traditional instrumental genres, Marc-André Hamelin includes two sets of studies. In terms of their stylistic breadth, formidable technical challenges and audacious invention, the Eight Concert Études (1984) hold their own against the celebrated benchmarks in the genre, from Liszt and Lyapunov to Godowsky’s re-worked Chopin. The Five Études in Different Intervals (1992) begins with a madcap study in minor seconds recalling the bouncy demeanor of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys (although here someone has dosed poor kitty with Grade A Catnip!), and ends with an octave study to end all octave studies. Throughout, Kapustin’s bottomless well of thematic resourcefulness works overtime.

The quote is famous, and typically Blakean: 'When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty'. Usually described as poet, painter, engraver and mystic - another way of saying that his work resists easy categorization - William Blake remains the artistic rebel par excellence, his work having lost none of its power to shock just as it shocked his contemporaries two centuries ago. From the age of eight (when he saw a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye) up to his death in 1827 at the age of 69, Blake's visionary gifts remained constant: the spiritual world was, for him, a more vital presence than the world in which he lived and worked, but which largely marginalized him.

The heavenly host are in full voice in David Delivered out of Many Waters, our choice of cover art for Trinity College's collection of Anthems. The painting is an illustration of Psalm 18 ('He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters'), and the psalms continue to provide a rich seam of inspiration across the arts, composers in particular having always responded creatively to the texts of many of them. (The most recent work included on the album is Sir James MacMillan's O give thanks unto the Lord, written in 2016, which sets the opening of Psalm 105.) Blake's watercolour obviously predates the music on Trinity's mixed programme, but powerfully complements it, and exemplifies the life and vigour which characterizes so much of his output in whatever medium.