Don’t be fooled by the funky title-lettering on the booklet. The programme of ‘La danse’ is hardly calculated for kicking off your shoes and shaking it off. Having said that, the former BBC Young Musician of the Year Martin James Bartlett does sound rather keen to shake off some pianistic shackles. Since his 2014 victory, he has been combining more prize-winning with festival participation, concert-giving and recording; if his social media posts are anything to go by, he has also started a sideline in pairing wines with music. Not that showmanship is his aim. If anything, what surprises me about the new album is Bartlett’s reserved approach – his avoidance of sentimental, colouristic or dramatic antics. Instead, he sounds as though on a mission to reveal the purely musical essence of the works.

The thoughtfully crafted programme allows us to savour a variety of bouquets as it wafts from Baroque innocence towards mourning the loss of that innocence in La valse. Rameau’s ‘Gavotte et Six Doubles’ has for some time been appropriated by pianists as a purely pianistic event. Bruce Liu’s recent recording (DG, 1/24) is a prime example of how it can be stretched, pushed and pulled around. I confess to having always heard it and played it that way myself (not with Liu’s accomplishment, I hasten to add). Bartlett’s crisp, clean, resolutely non-sentimental approach takes the piece back to its harpsichord roots, without actually imitating that sound world; and it returns us somewhere close to the genre of a danceable gavotte rather than a ponderous lament.

If this is a palate-cleanser, the oenophile Bartlett relates Couperin’s ‘Les barricades mystérieuses’ – again a movement from a larger collection of pieces, but rather less fitted than the Rameau to stand on its own – to a grape-stamping ‘dance’. In its turn, Couperin’s perpetual motion tunes us in for Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin. Attractively effervescent and tinkling though his playing is, on the whole Bartlett’s Tombeau is more strong Spanish dry than sparkling rosé, especially in the Toccata.

At times I do miss the sense of direction and ebb and flow that a top-flight Ravelian such as Lortie brings (Chandos, 5/89): that sense of wonder and constant renewal. There again, maybe Bartlett’s non-espressivo stand-offishness and thinness of tone are all part of the statement he wishes to make about the music’s historic forebears. Similarly, there is a lack of storytelling and elegance in the two waltzes from Hahn’s Le ruban dénoué (where Bartlett is joined by Alexandre Tharaud). And yet the young pianist has no trouble finding the deep, warm tones of a Georgian dessert wine in the Ravel Pavane and the Debussy Arabesque. Nor does his concluding La valse lack for witty caprice and fizzy flamboyance.