Debussy as usual put his finger on it, asking a mutual friend to tell Déodat de Séverac that his music ‘smells good’. It does indeed generate fumes aplenty, but we would be wrong, I think, to assume that was all it contains. Séverac believed passionately that the soul of French music could be saved from the narrow academicism that Paris too often fostered by turning to its folk music: and not so much to the actual tunes, as to its atmosphere, its spirituality and especially to its richness of ornament.

This ornamentation is so pervasive that it ends up seeming a necessary part of the structure. It is interesting to hear Izumi Tateno’s performance of the early Le Chant de la terre, completed in 1900, partly because it is not otherwise available on disc but also because of its relative plainness. The folk influence is audible, but there’s nothing here to mark the work out as being by Séverac rather than a number of other countryside-oriented pupils of the Schola Cantorum. With En Languedoc though, finished in 1904, decoration and the composer’s individual voice come into their own. Tateno’s playing is brighter in tone and in general subtler in its phrasing and in its management of textural planes that that of Jordi Masó, who tends to phrase rather lumpishly. However, in ‘A cheval’ he does gallop with gusto and has the fingers to deal with the tricky figurations. Tateno is less vivid here – but then Japan is not horse country.

The suite Cerdaña, completed in 1911, is richer still in ornament and includes what is probably Séverac’s most powerful piece, ‘Les muletiers devant le Christ de Llivia’. Again, Masó never really gets the music to lift off (he is not helped by a dull recording). He responds best to ‘Les muletiers’, but cannot match the breadth and spirituality of Blanche Selva, Séverac’s piano teacher, in her recording from the late 1920s. In general Billy Eidi’s more dramatic and colourful reading of the suite is to be preferred. In the two single pieces, Baigneuses au soleil and Les Naïades et le faune indiscret, both Tateno and Eidi find the tone of rustic never-neverlands. This may not be great music. But on a dull English February day its smell is wonderfully enticing and invigorating.