Clearly, Graham Caskie believes that music can be a collaborative rather than exclusive art if it’s not to be stifled, failing to mirror much beyond itself. He has therefore called on composer Stephen Goss (b1964) to intersperse the first book of Debussy’s Préludes with “Interludes” or “Footnotes”, and on artist Brian Dunce, who has taken his cue from Debussy’s admission: “I love pictures almost as much as music.” A related exercise was attempted by Cécile Ousset at the Burrell Museum in Glasgow, when her TV recital of the complete Préludes was accompanied by views of sculpture, paintings and, finally, a blaze of rockets and Bengal lights.

Such adventure is surely admirable and Caskie, who I recall from his refined playing on the competition circuit, is a model of poetic subtlety and discretion. This is some of the most poised and distilled Debussy I’ve heard for some time. Listen to his magically hushed start to Des pas sur la neige or his icy stillness in Goss’s The Frozen Lake. His virtuosity is impeccable, his musicianship in unfaltering taste. And whether you hear him in Goss’s I am that merry wanderer of the night, a skittish and elusive (now you see him, now you don’t) comment on Debussy’s La danse de Puck, or in the mystical drifting of Voiles, you can only marvel at his ease and authority.

Both composers are made to elide gracefully into each other, and the sequence ends with La cathédrale engloutie rather than Minstrels, a move that may well have made Debussy rethink his order. Cadenza Music’s sound is as fine-spun as the playing, and the second book of Préludes, similarly presented, must surely follow.