Not since Ronald Corp’s recording with his New London Orchestra, I think, have Satie’s three ballets been available on one disc. Well, all right, if that’s what you want; and Kaltenbach and his Nancy orchestra put their heart into it all and are extremely well recorded. Naxos talks cheerily of Satie’s ‘genius’ and vaunts the scores’ ‘brilliant and uninhibited orchestral colour, the impudent melodies still fresh and invigorating’; and that some people think that way is suggested by the inclusion of Satie in the New Grove Twentieth-Century French Masters volume (Macmillan: 1986). Possibly just about defensible in comparison with now fashionable mindless minimalism; but listening to this long sequence of trivial doodled snippets (13 movements in 14 minutes in Mercure, 21 in 21 in Relache) and in Parade frantic attempts to grab attention by the use of a typewriter, pistol shots and sirens – which may have seemed ‘daring’ or ‘amusing’ (or something) during and just after the First World War – I am tempted to echo the late Christopher Headington’s description of it all as ‘empty modishness’ (a view shared even by Satie’s friends Poulenc and Auric). The poverty of technique and invention is mercilessly revealed in the only extended piece here, the rarely-heard score to Rene Clair’s filmed entr’acte in Relache, in which much of the time is taken up by endless repetitions of tiny figures. ‘Master’! I ask you!'