The English pianist Daniel Grimwood’s latest disc, Henselt: Piano Works, on Edition Peters’s fledgling record label, is a fine selection of piano pieces by a now-forgotten genius of the instrument. Adolph Henselt (the von came later, gift of a grateful Russian nation) was born in Schwabach, Bavaria, in 1814, the son of an industrialist. He emigrated to Russia in 1838, having made a name for himself as a virtuoso to challenge Liszt and Chopin, at which point he began his long and outstanding career as a teacher. As Grimwood points out in his informative and amusing liner notes, it is rather ironic that neither founder of the great Russian pianistic tradition was in fact Russian – the other being Irishman John Field, inventor of the nocturne. It is unsurprising that one can discern foreshadows of Rachmaninoff’s approach to piano sonority in some of these pieces, for instance the grand Fantasy on a Bohemian-Russian Air: Henselt was the teacher of Nikolai Zverev, who was himself the teacher of “the six-and-a-half foot scowl”.