Two works of ripe Romantic élan here frame a relatively early and seldom-performed symphony by Saint-Saëns, all of them played with energy, colour and sensibility by the Suisse Romande Orchestra under Marek Janowski. In 1859, when Saint-Saëns composed his Second Symphony, he was still in his mid-twenties. Almost three decades would pass before he produced the much more famous Third in 1886 but the Second is interesting, not only because it shows Saint-Saëns’s thorough grounding in technical matters but also because it reveals where his musical leanings and influences lay. Not for nothing is Saint-Saëns dubbed a French classicist when you hear him intrepidly tackling a fugue in the symphony’s opening movement. It is a work that looks back to Beethoven, as well as drawing inspiration from the early 19th-century Romantics. The spirit of Mendelssohn (mixed maybe with Mozart and Haydn) hangs over the exuberant finale, and Schumann would seem to be the model for the Scherzo. Stylistically it is perhaps a bit of a melange but the symphony manages to hang together, the more so in a performance where the orchestral playing is so alert to rhythm and so cultured in phrasing, and the overall approach so buoyant.

The luminous orchestral palette of d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un chant montagnard français is beautifully defined here, with Martin Helmchen a scintillating partner in the piano solo, and Chausson’s Soir de fête is given with due rapture and instrumental glow. This is an imaginative programme, performed with panache.