Claire Chevallier plays this Erik Satie recital on a seven-octave 1905 Érard piano. “Satie bathed in a rich sound world, since pianos by Érard, Pleyel and Gaveau were to be found all over Paris…These considerations led me to choose a fine piano of Satie’s era,” she explains.

The choice of instrument is a level of detail that normally leaves me yawning, but the peachy, resonant tone of Chevallier’s piano is the making of this revelatory disc. As she further explains, the exceptionally long dimensions of the instrument’s action demand “considerable adaptation in playing technique.” Did that re-think also oblige Chevallier to set tempi strikingly broader than the norm? She doesn’t elucidate. But this is Satie for those suspicious about his adoption as a “chill-out” composer. Here he sounds dangerous, subversive, crazed.

On the first of the Gymnopédies, Chevallier clocks in at 4'37" – a third longer than Aldo Ciccolini’s 3'05" on EMI. Her other strategy is to melt, only marginally, the borders between melody and accompaniment, raising the left-hand in the timbral mix. Satie’s familiar melodic contours now emerge from a warped distance; but the deliberate tempo and slightly brittle touch keep the thing itself – the unveiling riddle – alive and transforming.

Gnossiennes receives an equally bold treatment, before some lesser-known pieces. Chevallier’s spacious Le fils de étoiles stresses how Satie’s inside-out structure evolves from harmony that is forced to work against its customary function. Prélude de la porte héroïque du ciel, with incongruously positioned cadence points and resolution-resistant harmonies, is played entirely deadpan – composer, pianist, instrument determined to bring down the music from the inside.