The film was the dream project of the director Wash Westmoreland and his choice of Adès to compose the soundtrack, though an unlikely one given the recent paucity of classical composers working in this medium, is nevertheless welcome and, it has to be said, works like a dream. In addition to music drawn from Saint-Saëns, Satie and Debussy, Adès has composed his own group of salon miniatures with the lightest of touches to complement the era from the belle époque (‘Claudine à l’École Print’) to the dawn of modernism (‘Claudine à Paris’).

Colette opens with a gorgeous waltz tune, built from fragments later developed, that floats into view on Snow Globe, before returning to its nebulous state. A slow variation appears in the Impressionistic ‘The Lake’, then in full party dress in ‘Claudine’s Journey’, where this winningly scored waltz stakes claim to be mentioned in the same breath as Richard Rodney Bennett’s Murder on the Orient Express. A second waltz in plusher chiaroscuro, ‘Valse du salon’, with variants elsewhere, evokes Parisian interiors c1900. Adès has a lot of fun with his ‘Dream of Egypt’. This Egyptian-style tableau, where Colette dances with ever more abandon, unleashes the image of a snake charmer as it gathers pace under a canopy of exotic orchestration. A delicately scored sequence from track 19 onwards introduces a wistful new theme taken up by the clarinet and featuring harp and strings in luminous settings. The elegiac threnody for ‘Jules Colette’s Burial’ stands in contrast to ‘Willy’s Arrival’, the music that profiles the raffish figure of Henry Gauthier-Villars, Colette’s first husband, played by Dominic West.

All this music is lovingly played by a group of hand-picked musicians, led by Jacqueline Shave, in homage to a lady who was an iconoclast of her age, newly minted for our time by Adès.