Massenet wrote eight orchestral suites (apart from those arranged from his numerous stage works), of which the Scenes pittoresques and Scenes alsaciennes once enjoyed a considerable vogue with light classical orchestras and audiences—though neither those nor the other suites are to be found in current record catalogues. Their easy, unpretentious and undemanding fluency is also to be found in Massenet's Op. 13 Suite (confusingly called No. 1 although, as the booklet points out, it was in fact his second), which was written as one of his Prix de Rome works. It was poorly received at its first performance in Paris in 1865 but did not deserve quite such harsh words as it drew from critics: the fugue (on a rather unpromising subject) in the first movement, the well-bred but skilful variations of the second and the rousing march of the finale are what might be expected of a good student.
The efficient Hong Kong orchestra plays them respectably, if without much subtlety—but that surely reflects on the conductor. Kenneth Jean, an American who grew up in Hong Kong and then worked as associate conductor in Chicago and Cleveland before becoming resident conductor for six years of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, appears to have a heavy hand in general, and is at his best in the blustering melodrama and full-blooded emotionalism of the ''Evocation'' from Massenet's extraordinary romantic opera Esclarmonde. He allows his rather brash brass too great a prominence throughout, and in the Minuet from Cendrillon his accents are much too fierce: seductiveness and charm elude him in the ''Filles de noblesse'' movement from that same fairy opera, which both AB and JBS called ''enchanting'' but which does not evoke that adjective here. There is some welcome lightness in the ''Ile magique'' and atmosphere in the ''Chasse'' movements from Esclarmonde, but here as elsewhere the overresonance of the hall where the recordings—good in themselves, with an exceptionally wide dynamic range—were made tend to clog up what should be moments of silence.'