The aqueous glints and flecks of colour in Debussy’s La mer are attractively caught in this performance by the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, of which Myung-Whun Chung has been music director and chief conductor since 2006. More than that, though, the playing conveys the surging atmosphere, the fluid movement and the awe-inspiring grandeur of ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’, the delicate playfulness of ‘Jeux de vagues’ and the sense of foreboding at the start of ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ before the gusts and the waves launch into their dramatic discourse. The Seoul orchestra’s sonority is both ripe and alert to detail, Chung’s direction judging the pace and the range of dynamics in the music with a sure sense of its ebb and flow.

On different territory, the classical limpidity of Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye is voiced clearly, sensitively and with apt restraint in ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’. The exotic timbres of ‘Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes’ are nicely pointed up, the dream-world of ‘Le jardin féerique’ evoked in playing of magical softness and captivating charm, and with glowing radiance at the end. Chung also has the measure of La valse. Starting tentatively, with the germinal motifs suggested in a whisper, the performance traces the dancers’ sedate, graceful response to the seductive waltz metre with admirable decorum, before the music’s potential for abandon begins to suggest itself in the give-and-take of rhythm and then in the gathering, sensual excitement of the closing bars.