Longer ago than I care to remember, a music teacher played me some piano music by Jean-Michel Damase and then said: ‘Well, nothing there to upset anybody.’ Mind you, he didn’t have to listen to 75'40" of it. Nicholas Unwin performs with stunning virtuosity, every ripple of every arpeggio in its ordained place, and the sound quality (one of Potton Hall’s Steinways) is unimpeachable. But music? Twenty minutes was more than enough. I think of the exchange between Chabrier and Benjamin Godard. Godard: ‘My dear Emmanuel, what a pity you started so late!’ Chabrier: ‘My dear Benjamin, what a pity you started so early!’ Damase was setting texts by Colette at nine years old, and has gone on for nearly 70 years from there, eschewing what he calls ‘forced novelty’ (fair enough) but replacing it with every cliché in the textbook. One wouldn’t mind, were it not that this sort of unfocused garrulity tends to give French music a bad name. As you may possibly have gathered by now, not for me.