Mikko Franck and his French Radio Philharmonic turn to César Franck for their first recording for Alpha, coupling the Symphony in D minor, a work we hear less frequently these days than we used to, with the early Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, something of an unknown quantity until recently, and a piece still shrouded in a certain aura of mystery.

The Symphony gets a fine performance here. Franck understands its logic and tensions, its balance between weight and elegance, its Wagnerian overtones and moments of sensuousness. The orchestral sound is dark yet clear, in contrast to, say, the forward brightness of tone favoured by Yannick Nézét-Séguin and his Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra. Franck balances immediacy with pace and proportion, so that the introspection, anxieties and elation of the first movement register without fracturing our awareness of shape and structure, while the second movement really is an Allegretto, lilting and sometimes urgent, rather than the reflective near-Andante we often hear. The finale opens fiercely (we could do with some of Monteux’s grace and urbanity at this point), though Mikko Franck’s handling of the complex musical argument, binding the work’s themes carefully together, is unfailingly impressive.

We know less about Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne than we would wish, meanwhile. Variously dated to 1846 or 1848, it remained unpublished in Franck’s lifetime and for many years thereafter. The manuscript was only deposited in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1946 and the premiere didn’t take place until 1987. Nowadays sometimes described as the first symphonic poem, it both predates Liszt’s work of the same name and shares its literary source, a poem by Victor Hugo from Les feuilles d’automne, published in 1831, which effectively imagines a cosmic symphony, ‘a music ineffable and profound’, in which the majestic sounds of nature and the turbulent cries of alienated humanity are heard in counterpoint.

Where Liszt is essentially dramatic, Franck is meditative. The score is to some extent ahead of its time, its opening section, in which an initially immovable E major chord gradually emerges over a penumbral pedal point, pre-empting Wagner’s Rheingold prelude by several years. What follows aspires to a sense of timeless numinosity as shifting themes – chordal for nature, chromatic for mankind – expand and contract over pulses that alternately quicken and slacken. It’s music that runs the risk of turning repetitious if not carefully handled, though Franck, adopting spacious tempos, magisterially sustains both the slowly gathering momentum and the near devotional mood. As with the Symphony, the playing has great richness and fervour, with the woodwind and brass particularly fine in both works. The recording itself is beautifully engineered and scrupulously balanced.