Charles Koechlin’s name has a prominent place in the development of French music but his music has so far eluded me, just as Vers Ispahan, the diary by Pierre Loti of a journey through Persia which inspired this cycle of 16 movements, has not crossed my radar. Though Koechlin (1867-1950) was much admired by Debussy, Ravel, Milhaud, Roussel, Satie and other fellow composers, audiences have never shared their enthusiasm. Few will have heard a note of Koechlin in a recital.

With its hints of prescient Messiaen and multi-layered impressionism, Les heures persanes (‘The Persian Hours’) has a unique sound world, though these miniature tone-poems (the longest lasts 7'27", the shortest 1'47") are not designed to put a spring in your step. You have to be in the right frame of mind for their amorphous, atmospheric, polytonal evocations of day and night, their predominant very slow tempi and (my main criticism) lack of expressive variation: one ‘Clair de lune’ (there are three) could easily be replaced by another or, say, ‘Les collines au coucher du soleil’ (No 13).

Written between 1916 and 1919, much of it notated on three staves to accommodate Koechlin’s complex layers (perhaps not surprisingly, he orchestrated the work in 1921), Les heures persanes unfolds in a dreamlike way in Ralph van Raat’s committed reading, playing that is truly inside the music – an artist ploughing his own furrow and thoroughly in tune with Koechlin’s own defiant credo: ‘Eh bien, tant pis! I’ll write what I want to, and modulate as I like provided I don’t end in the original key – the day on which I found my own way, everything was all right.’ Good recording, sensitive breathing space between tracks, and with the pianist’s own booklet.