There are 22 short works on this disc and a good number more if you include each brief waltz and quadrille that forms the Quadrilles in F and B flat major. All were written between 1840 and 1844 with the exception of the Galopp in D fragment from about 1831. Smetana was still finding his feet and though the influences of Chopin, Schumann and occasionally Liszt hover over this collection it is the shallow end of the salon market that dominates style and melodic content. Had the music not got Smetana’s name attached to it, I doubt if more than one or two pieces would have had the cobwebs brushed off, any more than the second-hand polkas, mazurkas and waltzes of the likes of Leybach, Ketterer, Ascher and other justly forgotten salon composers of the mid-19th century.

Sparks of individuality occasionally attract attention – the Galopp di bravoura, Louisen‑Polka (a great favourite of Smetana himself) and the Impromptu in E flat minor – but for most of the course of the disc we are firmly in also-ran country. Miss Cechová has been closely recorded (over six days, it turns out), which exaggerates her sometimes heavy‑handed approach in a balance that favours the bass.

This is her fifth volume of Smetana’s music and I can’t help feeling, having not the earlier ones, that this is a dutiful study of minor works of chief interest to completists. To hear the best of Smetana’s unduly neglected piano works try the cherry‑picked recitals by Kathryn Scott (Chandos, 8/11) and Claudius Tanski (Dabringhaus und Grimm).