Debussy may have been a revolutionary but he was also the most deeply introspective of composers. Like Robert Graves in his poem ‘Through Nightmare’, he may well have said, ‘never be disenchanted of that land you sometimes dream yourself into…’ And here, surely, is a clue to Philippe Cassard’s four-CD set of the piano works. A master of verbal as well as musical felicity, he writes in his essay of a ‘nostalgic longing for those long dead’, the ‘anguish and grimacing’ of Masques (once oddly described as ‘a riot of Italian comedy’ by Cortot) and of an influence that reached out to Boulez, Stockhausen and, more provocatively, to Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk.

And so it is that his very personal slant on a composer he holds in awe and affection concentrates on a clouded interior life, the antithesis of conventional Romanticism. Even outwardly extrovert works such as ‘Ce qu’a vu le vent d’ouest’ or ‘Feux d’artifice’ have their nervy exuberance qualified. Even L’isle joyeuse, while hardly L’isle triste, is far remote from, say, Horowitz’s Lisztian uproar in the same piece. In ‘Minstrels’ Cassard plays down a direction such as nerveux et avec humour and, although he takes a brisk hand to the whirling enigma of Masques and the dazzling Toccata from Images oubliées, he is at his finest, most lucid and poetic in the sultry magic of ‘Soirée dans Grenade’, in the fragrance of ‘Bruyères’ (you can almost smell the heather), in the quiet and grave archaisms in ‘Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut’ and in the Sarabande from Pour le piano.

Elsewhere, in the drunken caperings of ‘General Lavine – excentric’ or the wild exultance of the Etudes’ ‘Pour les octaves’ and ‘Pour les accords’, I wished that he would step out more vigorously into the light. But this is to go against the grain of his argument and approach, one of an unfailing integrity and musical quality. For encores and for good measure Cassard has included Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon and Pièce pour le Vêtement du blessé and, with the exception of the last two pieces, his soft-grained Bechstein piano has been lovingly chosen to reflect his interpretation.