SO YOU think you have problems. Music critics have them, too. You spend an evening listening to Imogen Cooper play Schubert and you find your critical faculties have been demolished. The lady is an enchantress. What is more – and especially now that Alfred Brendel has left the stage – she is without peer in Schubert.

In truth, Brendel was much more cerebral. Miss Cooper is totally intuitive. Of course, she has already put in the spade-work. But when she performs you know that she is recreating the music anew.

On Thursday, we were celebrating – as London loudly trumpeted a few weeks ago – Cooper’s 60th birthday, as well as the start of the British Music Society’s 89th season. She began innocently enough with the four Impromptus, D.899, even flirting with over-interpretation. The first glimpse of heaven came in the third, in G flat, the melody wonderfully peaceful on its return.

She used the delightful German Dances, D.790 as hors d’oeuvre for the A minor sonata, D.784, both written in 1823. Tragedy aptly coloured the whole sonata, which marks Schubert at his most sombre. There was more than a suggestion of rebellion in the hammered octaves near the close, brilliantly precise despite the intense pace.

Similarly in his last sonata, D.960 in B flat, Cooper sustained the sense of mystery that grows from the distant trills at the start, paradoxically alongside an alluring intimacy. Even the delicate scherzo and the frisky finale hinted at greater depths. I shall recover. But not too soon, I hope: the spell is intoxicating.