The concept album is now a well-established category in the Awards: in an era of streaming it offers a haven, an opportunity to experience as a whole something that captures your imagination, rather as you might Wagner’s Ring, albeit on a more modest timescale.

There’s something deliciously apt about this year’s winner, with composers as conceptual as Erik Satie and John Cage being united on an album, courtesy of the endlessly enquiring mind of Bertrand Chamayou. But there’s more: what is so seductive about ‘Letter(s) to Erik Satie’ (whose title derives from a lost Cage piece) is the way that Chamayou programmes it so that pieces you think you know – dammit, you know you know – sound as fresh as can be in their newly reframed settings.

It’s also a celebration of two men who’ve both been cursed by being remembered largely for a single piece – and while 4'33" doesn’t put in an appearance, the First Gymnopédie does, but it’s positioned after Cage’s potent Prelude for Meditation, the prepared piano at its most haunting.

Cage was, of course, a great admirer of Satie’s music (demonstrated when he organised the first performance of the latter’s Vexations in New York in 1963, an event lasting over 18 hours) and throughout Chamayou plays up these associations, the pieces from Satie’s Sports et Divertissements being followed by the tributes by Cage. But what’s just as striking is the way that his ‘reframing’ allows music as familiar as the three Gnossiennes to sound absolutely fresh. And the absurdist Satie‑inspired photoshoot is another masterstroke, with Chamayou fully entering into the spirit of it all. Harriet Smith

The Recording

Letter(s) to Erik Satie

Bertrand Chamayou pf

Erato (12/23)

Engineers Damien Quintard, Arnaud Merckling

Read the review | Buy or stream on Presto Music

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