‘This recording pays homage to the tradition of these pieces,’ says Michael Tilson Thomas in an introduction to this 12-item miscellany. ‘Playing them is now nearly a lost art.’ I wonder whether that is entirely true, when the programme includes such core numbers as Fauré’s Pavane, Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, Sibelius’s Valse triste and Delius’s On hearing the first cuckoo in spring. Nor are Mahler’s Blumine or the entr’acte from Schubert’s Rosamunde exactly uncommon, though the languorous, mannered way in which Tilson Thomas conducts the latter certainly lends it a novel profile. A tiny motivic similarity between the Rosamunde music and the start of ‘The Alcotts’ from Charles Ives’s A Concord Symphony neatly establishes a link to one of the less familiar choices here, and it is fun to have Delibes’s ‘Cortège de Bacchus’ from his ballet Sylvia as a final item, a deliciously Frenchified foretaste of Elgar in pomp-and-circumstance mode.

Back in 2000 Mariss Jansons and the Oslo Philharmonic released an EMI disc of ‘World Encores’ (alas nla) that also included Valse triste but was in general upbeat. Tilson Thomas has homed in more on the reflective repertoire, though he does begin with the Scherzo from Litolff’s Concerto symphonique No 4, glitteringly played by Yuja Wang. Here, however, Tilson Thomas is perhaps closer to the mark about the lost art of performing such pieces, for you only have to recall Cherkassky, Curzon, Katin or Moura Lympany to remember the artless wit and sparkle that such music can radiate.