Gounod and Bizet make a good pair; Faust and Carmen are among the greatest of French operas, and the older man recognized the genius of the younger who was also his pupil, making a tearful speech at Bizet's funeral. But their talents were wider-ranging than this might suggest, for both were early in acquiring a strong academic technique and won the coveted Prix de Rome. Although Gounod wrote his First Symphony as late as 37, it is a classical work which reveals little or nothing specifically Gallic or personal and would, I suspect, puzzle anyone coming to it for the first time and trying to identify its composer. But its idiom surely stems from the composer's early friendship with Mendelssohn's sister Fanny Hensel, who introduced him to her brother's music as well as that of Bach and Beethoven, and later to Mendelssohn himself. This civilized and elegantly mannered music, which includes a mock-solemn fugue in the slow movement (at 2'33'') and a Haydnesque slow introduction to the finale, is given with grace by Christopher Hogwood and his orchestra.
The Petite symphonie is delightfully done by nine expert players who deserve to have been named in the booklet. It's a later piece and a more original one in that it uses only wind instruments and is really a chamber work: in fact it was written for a chamber music society of wind players. Agreeable if bland, with an especially attractive scherzo, it shows that the composer's dictum that ''France is essentially the country of precision, neatness and taste'' was entirely true for his kind of Frenchness, if by no means that of Berlioz or Barraque.
The Bizet work here reflects a stronger personality, and the selection of numbers from his incidental music to Daudet's L'Arlesienne has been edited by Christopher Hogwood from the original theatre orchestration. It was for an unusual combination of instruments, having seven violins but only one viola, a saxophone, piano and two horns of which one is natural and the other valved. The original keys, sometimes altered in the familiar orchestral suites, have been restored in this specially devised sequence, and the performance is committed and compelling. I only wish that separate tracks had been provided for the six pieces. The recording is spacious and detailed.'