Although it was overshadowed by the furore surrounding the premiere of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring a fortnight later, Debussy’s ballet Jeux itself provoked a storm – chiefly of bewilderment – when it was first staged at the same Paris theatre in May 1913, and it has had a somewhat nervous presence in the record catalogues, and certainly in live performances, ever since.

The latest conductor to brave this fascinating, tantalisingly enigmatic, elusive, evanescent score is Michael Tilson Thomas, who combines Jeux with Images and La plus que lent on a disc drawn from concerts with his San Francisco Symphony Orchestra in 2013 and 2014. Jeux calls for extremes of discrimination in terms of instrumental balance together with similar discipline in achieving absolute clarity in the superfine but intricate web of textures and thematic allusions. This is not impossible, as we know from Pierre Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra in the 1990s and, especially, from Bernard Haitink and the Concertgebouw Orchestra on a disc that won the Gramophone Award in 1980 in both the orchestral and engineering categories. Compared with those two, Tilson Thomas’s version is a good, overall reading of the score, its structure coherent, its ebbs and flows well judged. But the precision of colour and the subtle spectrum of dynamics that Haitink and Boulez achieve still place their recordings on pedestals of their own.

However, Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco players are more compelling in Images, which comes across with brilliance, swagger, suppleness and, in ‘Les parfums de la nuit’, suggestive exoticism. La plus que lente, with its tangy cimbalom and its tinges of nostalgia and ebullience, makes for a beguiling envoi. Geoffrey Norri