Even when I was a little girl, Bach was an essential composer for me. Why? Well, I thought he was jazzy and incredibly cool. His music always seemed to dance and sparkle, with wit and sharpness. His voice told a story, and it had immediacy – even while I attempted to play his fugues and pick through the counterpoint.

As an adult musician, I still turn to Bach almost every day. His music is clarity itself, yet it provokes all kinds of problems to be solved, technical and psychological. There seems to be almost no extraneous information on the page – tempi, touch and articulation – and yet there’s an enormous amount to uncover in terms of stylistic choices. Ornamentation, colouring, to pedal or not pedal: all the things pianists mull over, worry about, experiment with and ultimately change over a period of years (compare Schiff’s early recordings of Bach with his more recent ones). So why intertwine him with Shostakovich?

There’s a fairly swift answer to this – I was asked a few years ago to broadcast a live recital of Bach and Shostakovich preludes and fugues on the BBC, and I think they were expecting me to play two...