This disc of French music would make a lovely, balanced concert programme: two concertante works for violin, an orchestral lollipop and a symphony. The Gallic performers may require an introduction for Gramophone readers: the Orchestre de Chambre Pelléas was established in 2004 and is managed by a committee of its musicians. They play on modern instruments but adopt a historically informed performance style. Born in Montpellier, Alexandra Soumm is a former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist. I heard her play a terrific Lalo Symphonie espagnole some years back, but she has only cropped up in these pages once before, in Jeremy Nicholas’s Collection surveying Paganini’s First Violin Concerto (2/14).

Milhaud’s Le boeuf sur le toit, in its less familiar cinéma-fantaisie guise with Arthur Honegger’s cadenza, is dispatched with cheeky insouciance by Soumm, shimmying to the Latin rhythms while also digging deep as we drift into North American hoedown territory. Conductor Benjamin Levy doesn’t drive the music as fast as Daniel Harding on Renaud Capuçon’s Virgin/Erato disc of French concertante works, but it all sounds as if they’re kicking up their heels.

Soumm also displays a rich lower register in the lengthy cadenza that opens Tzigane. This is the first recording of the new Ravel Edition, created at Capuçon’s request. In the booklet notes, François Dru explains that there were a number of copying errors in the solo part which Ravel transcribed into the orchestral score. A complete manuscript of the violin-and-piano version, bearing Ravel’s signature and dated April-May 1924, was recently rediscovered in Monaco, featuring rhythmic patterns that resemble Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Jelly d’Arányi, the work’s dedicatee, advised Ravel on the writing of this cadenza.

Capuçon gave the first performance of this new edition in 2020. His recording of the earlier edition is silky smooth, ironing out too much of Ravel’s rough-hewn solo writing. Soumm’s rendition is much earthier in that cadenza, biting into the score with fierce double-stopping and pungent accents. The orchestral accompaniment, when it arrives, is slightly compromised – as it is on the rest of the disc – by a lack of clarity in the reverberant acoustic of the small Salle Colonne in Paris, robbing us of instrumental detail.

Soumm plays so well that I rather wished for a whole disc of concertante works – perhaps the Symphonie espagnole – but it’s understandable that Levy wanted to showcase his orchestra. They give a punchy account of Chabrier’s Bourrée fantasque, not in the usual orchestration by Felix Mottl but a new one made by Thibault Perrine based on sketches left by the composer and employing a smaller number of instruments. (Incidentally, the recording is incorrectly tagged on streaming services as being ‘arr for violin and orchestra’.) It’s all very jolly in a swaggering, unsubtle way.

Bizet’s Symphony in C is also given a gutsy reading – not perhaps the epitome of meringue-light playing and finesse you’d hear in the best accounts, but it’s high-spirited and there’s some fabulous oboe-playing in the Adagio.