It’s not clear whether Dynam-Victor Fumet (1867-1949) acquired his forenames before or after the experiments with bomb-making that had him expelled from the Paris Conservatoire in the 1880s. His explosive temper also led him to resign from the night club Le chat noir because a patron had asked him to play something silly; his successor, Erik Satie, apparently had no such qualms.

These pieces go through a range of styles. Fumet took lessons from César Franck, and the combination of his own gently populist talent and Franckian chromaticism can be intriguing – rather as if Noël Coward had studied with Elizabeth Lutyens. Elsewhere, in a charming Nocturne in E flat, he comes closer to Fauré, while the Fugue that forms part of the fourth Etude caractéristique is a more than passable pastiche of JSB.

Most of this music is fiendishly fast and difficult, and in bulk the prestidigitation does become slightly oppressive. Akiko Ebi scores full marks for the cleanness and delicacy of her playing; I would have welcomed a little more warmth – the piano tone is a bit thin and hard. But she responds wonderfully to Fumet’s quirky imagination and I’m grateful to her for introducing me to this curious music which, when the composer is not deliberately imitating others, is unlike anything else written in France between the 1880s and his death in 1949. For any reader wanting to find the scores of these pieces, I should perhaps warn that neither I nor anyone I know has ever seen them outside the French National Library.