Self-help, a near-saintly patience and a nurturing record company (Nonesuch) kept him going.Goode was 47 before he gave his first Carnegie Hall recital. Rather than yield to professional frustration, Goode calmly set about deepening and broadening his relationship with the music. The invitations from the thrusting management and promotion agencies did not come, and neither did the glitzy dates that would have brought his name to a wider public. After that, he gained a reputation locally as a fine chamber player and an insightful pianist, but he was also thought to be almost too much of a “musician’s musician”. But I thought that he might help – and he didn’t!” Now, of course, he has risen to his rightful place in the pianistic pantheon, and garners the kind of rave reviews in all the world’s major musical capitals that even Bernstein might have taken pause to envy.
Goode gave his first recital in his native New York in 1962 when he was 18 years old. With a trademark diffident chuckle, but not the slightest hint of bitterness, Goode replied that, “It was a great thing to hear Lenny say. When I interviewed Richard Goode, I reminded him that, as far back as 1977, Leonard Bernstein had expressed astonishment that a pianist of such skill was not playing the Brahms piano concertos all over the world.

The contributions from South Africa are entrancing, notably the call-and-response stuff from the Darktown Strutters, whose lead singer was Johannesburg’s more than adequate answer to Al Bowlly.. Here, too, is the bizarrely named Lagos Mozart Orchestra, with its slow march tunes led by trumpets and bass tubas. Here is Sitti Binti Saad with her sweet miasma of accompanying strings. Thanks to the m?nge of musical styles brought in by migrant workers from India and the Middle East, Africa was a musical melting-pot long before the styles that it gave to the Americas had come home transformed. In South Pacific: Island Music, that intrepid Brit David Fanshawe found gospel chants from the Cook Islands, nose-flutes and skulling chants from Tonga, plus conch curfews and New Year bamboo guns.Meanwhile, the Wergo label has produced a box of surprises entitled Echoes of Africa: early recordings 1930s-1950s. In Nubia: The Water Wheel, Hamza El Din showed what magic he and his oud could extract from blended Egyptian and Sudanese elements. It’s a revelation to listen to the Nonesuch Explorer of 1969, its music uncontaminated by Western influences.

The first 20, covering Africa and Indonesia, are an indispensable map of the musical past. This formed part of the Nonesuch Explorers, a massive project that put world music on the commercial map long before the term itself was dreamt up.The 92 LPs that constituted this panoptic view of five continents are currently being reissued as CDs by Warner. One of the recordings he selected is reissued this month – Golden Rain, recorded by the British musicologist David Lewiston in Bali. In Sicily, he found work songs by almond-sorters and lemon-pickers.In 1977 Lomax was invited to choose the music to be sent into the cosmos on board the Voyager satellite. His Italy is galvanised by new-minted political ballads, and rings with the sound of bagpipe and accordion.