Mendelssohn conceived the Violin Concerto in E minor for his childhood friend, Ferdinand David, concertmaster of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, though it took the composer years to perfect it. The concerto remains one of the most significant works in the genre – serene, lyrical and luminous. Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major is another of the 19th century’s greatest concertos, written for his favourite student, Iosif Kotek, and a work of great beauty bristling with virtuoso challenges. On this album they are performed by the brilliant Guido Sant’Anna, the first South American violinist to win the prestigious Fritz Kreisler International Competition.

Once Messiaen had, five years ahead of time, accepted the commission from Alice Tully to write a piece that would mark the US bicentennial of 1976, he consulted an encyclopaedia in search of a suitable subject. What he found was the canyon territory of southern Utah. In the spring of 1973 he paid the region a visit—as the Utah Symphony would do fifty years later, to give a performance of the resulting work in the canyons and under the stars, a performance to which this studio recording relates.

The choral versions of La mort d’Ophélie and Sara la baigneuse may be relative rarities on record but both are vintage Berlioz, short and striking, which should be much better known. Yet further incentive to acquire a terrific account of the Symphonie fantastique.

Don’t be fooled by those well-known portraits of Saint-Saëns the bearded éminence grise—the two symphonies recorded here are the work of the young Camille, spreading his compositional wings and displaying a technical fluency far beyond his teenage years. In between, a certain musical menagerie roars, clucks, brays and squawks for attention …