There has been a resurgence of interest in Antoine Mariotte of late thanks to the revival, in 2014, of his 1908 opera Salomé – the subject, in his lifetime, of a notorious legal battle between himself and Strauss’s publishers over the rights to Oscar Wilde’s play, on which it is similarly based. Stylistically straddling Impressionism and modernism, he’s an intriguing figure. Like Roussel, he divided his early career between music and the navy, studying with Widor while on leave, and sketching musical impressions of the Far East while sailing the South China Sea. In later life he taught composition in Lyon, and was director of the Opéra-Comique from 1936 to 1939.

Daniel Blumenthal’s imposing recital juxtaposes a handful of his songs with two big piano works from the 1920s. Impressions urbaines (1921) depicts the factories, dance halls and stations of a unnamed French city – possibly industrial Saint Etienne, where Mariotte was initially educated. Growling and percussive, it has been compared with Honegger’s Pacific 231 and Prokofiev’s Le pas d’acier, though its ethos is naturalist rather than machine-age – an evocation of the dehumanising cities of Zola or Verhaeren rather than a contructivist glorification of labour. Bleak, unresolved figurations echo Debussy’s ‘Des pas sur la neige’. A climactic funeral march, depicting crumbling tenements, recalls ‘Bydlo’ from Mussorgsky’s Pictures. Apart from the dancehall scherzo, where Mariotte lightens the textures, the writing is unremittingly heavyweight. Blumenthal powers his way through it with compelling force.

Kakémonos, dating from 1925 but reworking sketches made in Japan some 30 years earlier, brings out more finesse in his playing. Michel Fleury’s booklet-notes argue that Mariotte may have studied Japanese music while in the Far East: apart from an incongruous temple scene, over which the influence of Debussy’s ‘Pagodes’ looms large, this is not so much an Orientalist fantasy as a cool reproduction of Eastern melodic and harmonic structures. The mélodies are elegant, if slight: Sabine Revault d’Allonnes sings them with admirable poise but can be tentative in her upper registers. Fleury’s superb essay comes in French and English, though no translations are given for the sung texts.