In her insert notes, the great Satie authority Ornella Volta reminds us that the composer wrote ‘for amateurs who didn’t attend formal concerts, but would play for themselves if they wanted to hear any music’. This essential intimacy poses problems for public performers, both in style of playing and in choice of venue and piano. This disc was recorded on a Steinway concert grand in St George’s, Bristol. In general I have nothing against instrument or venue, but I do question their appropriateness for Satie. I confess that, after hearing the whole disc, I came away feeling rather like Queen Victoria having been addressed by Gladstone as though she were a public meeting. Partly this is a question of instrument and venue, but also of Thibaudet’s broad-brush approach to the music. I yield to no one in my admiration for his Ravel playing. But here he too often misses the subtlety and jokes. The last movement of the Sonatine bureaucratique, for instance, marked vivace, is rattled off at an unfeeling presto so that we don’t have time to savour the hilarious disjunctions between echt Satie and the Clementi quotations.

At the other extreme, starting the disc with all seven Gnossiennes in a bunch is really carrying the meditational aesthetic too far, especially when there can be no historical justification (only three of the Gnossiennes were published in Satie’s lifetime). The first six come over better in two separate groups of three in the recital by Roland Pöntinen, who also lets the Gymnopédies speak for themselves without undue rubato.

On the credit side, it’s good that Thibaudet brings into the catalogue a number of previously unrecorded Satie pieces, including the tiny triptych L’enfance de Ko-Quo, discovered as recently as 1999, the third movement of which bears the sensible title: ‘Don’t put your head under your arm’.