It’s unlikely that Jeremy Nicholas’s eruditely witty and elegant new verses for The Carnival of the Animals will supplant the playful little poems Ogden Nash wrote in the 1950s and which have since become inseparable from Saint?Saëns’s score. And that’s a pity because, to my ears, Nicholas’s light-hearted urbanity is stylistically closer to the music itself. True, many of the jokes will shoot right over the heads of younger listeners, but then again, the same could be said of, say, “Tortoises”, and its wicked transformation of Offenbach’s Can-Can. On the other hand, Nicholas provides a welcome narrative context – a parade of Saint-Saëns’s menagerie through the streets of Paris – whose memorable visual images will likely enthral savvier children. The performance here by Nettle and Markham (who commissioned Nicholas’s text back in 1985) and a crackerjack instrumental ensemble is top-notch, too. “Aquarium” is simply gorgeous, with its sparkling suggestion of sunlight streaming through water; and the duo’s comic timing in “Pianists” had me laughing out loud, although I already knew the joke, of course. Nicholas delivers his lines with zest, using various dialects and accents to differentiate characters.

He’s a riveting storyteller in Poulenc’s Babar, as well, though I prefer the magical intimacy of the solo piano original to the busier textures of Nettle and Markham’s two-piano arrangement. The playing is strongly characterised, however – particularly the tender moments – and I’m grateful that the engineers kept the narration at a natural volume rather than allowing it to dominate the music. Ibert’s five descriptive miniatures make a charming interlude between the two larger works. In a word: enchanting.