Les Heures Persanes (‘The Persian hours’) evokes a two-month journey through Persia in 1900, but not by Koechlin (who never actually visited Persia) but by the writer, Pierre Loti, who recorded his visit in a diary. So the listener makes his musical journey filtered through the composer’s own response to the diarist’s exotic impressions in a series of 16 vignettes. Lotti suggested: ‘He who wants to accompany me to see the roses bloom in Isfahan, must be prepared to travel slowly at my side, from place to place, as in the middle ages’.

Almost all this music is leisurely, if seductively so, at times almost trance-like. This listener is thus made to linger in scenery which is is often picturesque in a gently evocative way (as in ‘En vue de la ville’ – No 5), although in the ‘A travers les rues’ the progress is swifter. ‘A l’ombre près de la fontaine de marbre’ does hint at a vision of trickling water and ‘Arabesques’ suggests glittering reflections. Yet both the haunting ‘Chant du soir’ and ‘Les Collines, au coucher du soleil’ inhabit a world of either twilight or sunlight, which the composer directs must always be Très calme. The closing number speaks for itself: ‘Derviches dans la nuit. Assez animé, nocturne mystérieuse – Variante – Clair de lune sur la place désert’, ending the journey mysteriously and enigmatically as it began, after the legendary roses have blossomed.

Stott uncannily holds the listener’s attention throughout: her pianistic colours are warm and often exotically sensuous, and she is very atmospherically recorded. Incidentally Koechlin also scored the work for orchestra, and there is a fine recording available on Marco Polo.