‘You play Bach your way,’ said the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, ‘I’ll play him his way.’ With equal justification, Blackie could make the same claim about any composer she plays. But she doesn’t, not in words at any rate.

Blackie does all her talking at the piano, with every note speaking volumes for the composer’s intent. That explains the mesmerising effect of her playing on audiences everywhere, including Jersey, where she’ll be making her fifth appearance at the Arts Centre… The audiences realise they are in the presence of a musician who’s not just superb but different.

It’s fashionable to extol ‘faithfulness to the score’ as the ultimate musical virtue. Yet for Blackie this is only the point of departure. The message a composer sends to the world cannot be wholly contained within a written document – otherwise we’d have recitations, not recitals. Music lives only as a tripartite collaboration between composer, performer and audience. And the nature of this collaboration changes with time because our experience does. The music isn’t chiselled in stone – it lives, and lives are always dynamic. That’s why showing what the music means today involves interpretation, not just pianism.

‘You’ve changed my life,’ said a Russian woman after one of Blackie’s Moscow recitals. ‘Not me,’ was the reply. ‘It’s Beethoven.’