By offering at least one version of every Chaminade piano piece recorded on 78s, this set serves as a thorough introduction to Chaminade’s art as it was experienced in her heyday. The music is hard to classify – too charming to be taken seriously by the snobbish but often too treacherous to be left to the amateurs. It has subsequently hovered on the edge of the repertoire, occasionally taken up by virtuosos from Godowsky to Mark Viner, but still viewed with scepticism. These varied performances by contemporary advocates should quell any doubts.

The collection also introduces us to a number of forgotten pianists. It’s a rare party at which William Murdoch (who turns in a thoughtfully shaped and articulated Danse créole and a touching Sérénade) is among the more recognisable guests – and only the most devoted pianophiles will have encountered even half the pianists here. True, you won’t want to renew acquaintance with all of them: Marie Novello, for instance, fusses over the music; Hans Barth’s rubato seems arbitrary. But there’s plenty elsewhere to entice you.

Pride of place goes to Chaminade protégée Una Bourne, whose mostly high-momentum performances stress the fire beneath the finery: the huge washes of sound in the Tristan-drenched Étude have the same cataclysmic power as her ferocious reading of the Wagner-Liszt Liebestod on APR’s recent Bourne survey. But there’s affection, too, in the rarely heard Nocturne; and she draws you into the Valse caprice with unexpected grace.

There’s also Lilian Bryant’s stunning Toccata, Gertrude Meller’s elastic Air de ballet, Op 30, and Thomas Cole’s scorching Scherzo. Along with Rudolph Ganz’s melancholy in the Pas des écharpes, the character of these performances makes us wonder why these pianists have disappeared. Even the often-maligned Mark Hambourg shows himself to excellent advantage in a richly characterised Étude de concert ‘Automne’. The recital closes with the most celebrated pianist represented, Shura Cherkassky, offering Chaminade’s Autrefois, a tribute to the French Baroque that’s both wistful and whimsical.

But the main virtue of the release is to remind us of the inimitable playing of Chaminade herself. She cut only seven discs, all in 1901, and they all have the same paradoxically death-defying delicacy – the same ability to balance technical demands (listen to the whirlwind of notes in the Courante) and palm-court charm – coupled with an infectious sweep and laced with an irony that keeps both sentimentality and self-aggrandisement at bay. This is playing of rare poise.

APR has issued much of this material before, but these are all excellent new transfers, and in any case, even longtime collectors will want this release for its new discoveries and for Jeremy Nicholas’s annotations. Warmly recommended.

This review originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano