Charles Koechlin's list of original works includes well over 200 opus numbers, but he was also a prodigious and skilled orchestrator, regularly transcribing not only his own chamber pieces but music by other composers, too. The latest release in Hänssler's slowly accumulating Koechlin survey is devoted to the best known of those transcriptions, the earliest of them a seven-movement suite from his straightforward orchestration of the incidental music his teacher Fauré had composed to Maeterlinck's play Pelléas et Mélisande in 1898.

It's the version of the music that's regularly performed, and Debussy's "legende dansé" Khamma, too, is only ever performed in Koechlin's orchestration. It was completed after Debussy lost interest in his commission to compose a ballet for the Canadian dancer Maud Allan, and Koechlin was brought in by a despairing publisher who, fearing litigation, asked him to turn the piano score into orchestral form. Even then, Allan never danced it, and the music was not performed until six years after Debussy's death. Koechlin's version is luminous and supple; Khamma is comparable in scale with Jeux, which followed soon after, and was to be one of Debussy's greatest achievements, though Koechlin continued to insist that the more austere Khamma was superior.

In some respects, though, it's two of the other pieces here, an orchestration of Schubert's Wanderer Fantasy for solo piano and orchestra and the transcription of Chabrier's brilliant Bourrée Fantasque that show Koechlin's skills at their best. There's no attempt in either to imitate the style of another composer, as there inevitably is in the Debussy and Fauré; both are just exercises in supreme orchestral craft – preserving the virtuoso edge in the Wanderer Fantasy, distilling the wit and charm of Chabrier's miniature into a brilliant little showpiece. Heinz Holliger and the SWR Orchestra play all these pieces with the right suave elegance, never overegging the effects; it's a charming collection.