Symphonist to the Revolution vs revolutionary symphonist: Les Siècles and their founder-maestro have put flesh on the bones of a comparison more often made in print than on record, while joining a notable line of French-accented Fifths. If François-Xavier Roth’s tempos are near-identical to those of Emmanuel Krivine (and Beethoven), the tangy palette of his Franco-German instrumentarium (helpfully laid out in the booklet) more nearly resembles that of the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra in 1951 under Carl Schuricht (EMI/Warner, 1/13 in its latest reissue). So does his unobtrusive handling of pulse, which allows his wind soloists rhetorical space but not at the expense of a sung line that reaches its natural climax on the top note of the finale’s arpeggio motif.

Aux armes, citoyens, but don’t throw away your opera-cloaks: more personal touches to this Fifth abound in the string portamento and (less subtly) Roth’s fondness for spread chords evoking a much older playing style. There is some fashionably dainty fiddling with dynamics, not all of it as illuminating or affecting as the bass pizzicato gently pressing for attention at 3'50" in the Andante con moto. I will surely return to this Fifth for its dazzling array of timbre – piccolo and trombone less theatrical in this regard than the cutting-edge horns and marvellously contralto-ish clarinets of Les Siècles – but among new recordings, something unfussily ‘right’ about Jordi Savall’s reading (Alia Vox, see above) breathes a confident air of permanence.

Which leaves Gossec, the iridescent orchestration and agreeably forgettable melodies of his symphony ‘in 17 voices’. Under Werner Ehrhardt, Concerto Köln are the pre-eminent specialists in the field of oddball late 18th-century symphonists – there are quite a few, as Nalen Anthoni outlined in an entertaining Specialist’s Guide (11/17) – and for all the undoubted editorial virtues of the new edition used by Les Siècles and promoted in a stand-alone booklet essay, I don’t feel that their extrovert, more rhetorically marked approach supersedes the delicacy of sentiment in the older recording’s sensitive handling of the Larghetto, where Roth instead underlines the contrasts of dynamic and idiom that make it so obviously contemporary but also inferior to Beethoven’s example in the Fifth.