In recent years I've become aware of (rather than noticed) a tiny but significant development in the packaging and presentation of compact discs.

I have no idea if it amounts to a trend, or even a tendency: my collecting of CDs has become more or less governed by the need to review new and recent discs requested by me from the record companies, so systematic collecting has become almost a thing of the past.

And that also means that I have no real idea of how long the trend or tendency to which I refer has been running, or how extensive it might be. Some of my completist acquaintances, who correspond frequently and who I meet regularly on the concert hall commuter belt, might be able to enlighten me.

The development is this: the presence in CD programme booklets of the performers themselves, with a commentary on what they're doing and why. Traditionally, what you get in these booklets is the hard information about the recording, with the venue, the dates of the recording, and a plethora of information about the engineering, production and design staff, along with (sometimes) facts about the instruments used by the musician(s).

With this there is always a commissioned, learned programme note which embraces the background, historical, technical and contextual information about the composer and the music that is the subject of the recording. And the evolution of that alone, especially since the revolutionary launch, in 1983, of the compact disc, is worth a column in its own right (which I'll attend to on another day).

For now, let me give you just a few examples of performers getting in the door to express their own thoughts on what they're doing, which I am finding an enthralling and sometimes enlightening experience. I'll start with the splendid French pianist, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who was in Scotland only last weekend with Neeme Jarvi and the RSNO, playing Prokofiev. In one of his most recent discs, on the Chandos label, Bavouzet is the featured soloist on a recording devoted to the orchestral works with piano by Stravinsky. The orchestra is the fast-rising Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra, the conductor is the veteran Yan Pascal Tortelier, and the repertoire contains a variety of concerto and concerto-type pieces.

But it also includes a performance of Petrushka, which has a prominent piano part, usually played by the orchestra's house pianist. Bavouzet wanted to get off centre-stage and immerse himself in the orchestral texture, and he writes thrillingly about the experience of "hammering out an A major chord with all my might, while submerged in an orchestra, all of whose members are playing fortissimo, and thus having scant chance of being heard at all." Paradoxically, he says, "it was one of my greatest musical joys" and he urges his fellow celebrity soloists to get out of the spotlight and feel the "exhilarating pleasure" of the experience.

On the same label, pianist Imogen Cooper, in each of the first two volumes of her ongoing survey of Schumann's piano music, inserts a "Note by the performer". In the latest note, on the F sharp minor Sonata, she writes about the difficulties of trying to contain Schumann's rampantly volatile, wild imagination, which "runs riot", with any sense of structure "dangerously threatened, if not absent", where "pieces hang together by sheer manic energy" and where "the performer wrestles with the problem of sounding out of control whilst actually not being so". Taking that perception back to the actual performance on disc adds a whole new dimension for the listener.

Over on ECM New Series, Andras Schiff did it very differently a few years back with his fantastic double recording of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations, using two very different pianos from different eras, where, in his quirky note, he set up a dialogue between himself and the composer, which was occasionally wacky and humorous, with Beethoven questioning why the sleek, gleaming, modern Steinway was always black and resembles a coffin. The "chat" between the two, however, was equally thought-provoking.

More recently, in his wonderfully fresh, stripped-down recording of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana on the Zig-Zag Territoires label, conductor Jos van Immerseel explains, through an interview, the reasons behind his choice of artists, his decision to use period instruments and his new perception of Orff's orchestration.

Not everybody will enjoy these "intrusions" by the performers. Some will maybe resent the feeling that they're being told what to think. They'd rather be left alone with their more objective programme note and their own thoughts on the music. Fair enough. I love the tendency, even if I don't always agree with all the performers' views. All perspectives are welcome on this life-enhancing art form. And all I can say is: more of the same, please.