Fernand de La Tombelle (1854-1928), the subject of Palazzetto Bru Zane’s latest composer portrait, was best known in his lifetime as a virtuoso organist and as co-founder, with Vincent d’Indy, of the Schola Cantorum in Paris, where he taught harmony from 1895. A titled aristocrat, he was a bit of a maverick and something of a polymath, a poet, folklorist and astronomer as well as a composer-performer, who divided his time between Paris, where his formidable pianist mother (a pupil of Liszt) held her salon, and his chateau at Fayrac in the Dordogne (now a local tourist attraction), which he substantially rebuilt.

As a composer, he could be eclectic and variable. Tassis Christoyannis and Jeff Cohen’s excellent disc of his mélodies (Aparté, 7/17) revealed both an unevenness of inspiration and a tendency on La Tombelle’s part to wear his influences overtly on his sleeve, an impression reinforced, to some extent, by this greater cross section of his work. There are wonderful things. The 1887 Fantaisie for piano and orchestra, a virtuoso exercise in Franckian cyclic form with a deeply felt slow movement and dazzling finale, is a terrific piece that should by rights be better known, as should his 1895 Piano Quartet, again deploying cyclic form. He set great store by his own choral music, of which we have too few examples here, though they include the exquisite Madrigal spirituel, which weaves a poem by Gabriel Ducos around a cantus firmus ‘Ave Maria’, and the secular Au fil de l’eau, which quite remarkably depicts a river in full flood.

Elsewhere, however, La Tombelle’s influences loom large and one notices some inequalities. Impressions matinales, the first of his two orchestral suites, opens with a sunrise modelled on ‘Morning Mood’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt, while its companion suite, Livre d’images, relies for its impact slightly too much on melodic repetition rather than thematic development. Though La Tombelle blew hot and cold about Wagner (he thought Massenet’s Le jongleur de Notre-Dame a greater score than Parsifal), there’s an overt debt to Tristan in the song-cycle Pages d’amour to his own rather flowery, erotic texts.

The performances, as we have come to expect from Bru Zane, are strong, though the tenor Yann Beuron, paired with Jeff Cohen for the songs, has a couple of uncharacteristic moments of strain in his upper registers. I Giardini do fine things with the Piano Quartet, there’s plenty of drama in Emmanuelle Bertrand and Pascal Amoyel’s performance of the intense 1902 Cello Sonata, and François Salque, Hermine Horiot and Adrien Bellom play with great lyrical refinement in the somewhat densely written Trio for three cellos from 1914. La Tombelle’s choral writing is nothing if not exacting, and the Flemish Radio Choir sing with exemplary poise and dynamic control here for Hervé Niquet, who also conducts the orchestral and concertante works with the Brussels Philharmonic. You can’t fault the performances of the suites, where the strings and woodwind have a lovely sheen and the brass really gleam. The high point, though, is the Fantaisie, played with exhilarating drive and panache by Hannes Minnaar, and superbly conducted by Niquet, who generates tremendous excitement with it throughout. It’s worth getting the set just for that.