While it is hard to envisage wanting to listen to Le chevalier et la damoiselle over and over again, it falls easily on the ear. One quality it shares with a recent disc of Philippe Gaubert’s chamber music (Fuga Libera) is a delicate pastoral lyricism. Here that mellifluousness is allied both to Gaubert’s extremely skilful, lucid and translucent orchestration and to some chivalrous, courtly musical gestures intended to evoke the atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Le chevalier et la damoiselle is a ballet, set in medieval Burgundy and centred on a princess who yearns for a man to help her know suffering in order to release her from a spell that forces her to spend her nights in the form of a doe. It was a huge success for Gaubert (1879-1941) at its Paris premiere in July 1941, and was the last thing he wrote and heard before his death a couple of days later.

Recollections of material provide the score with dramatic reference-points but it is the characterisation of certain individual scenes that particularly attract attention, be it the gamboling of the princess in her doe guise or the ardent music that wells up when she espies the right knight, who obliges by stabbing her and making her permanently human again. As this well-played performance shows, Gaubert’s romantic sensibility was enhanced by a refined appreciation of instrumental timbre.

Gaubert, in this instance, resembles a sort of Gallic Glazunov. Nothing wrong with that, once in a while.