There are those of us who are in seventh heaven when a new disc of Saint-Saëns’s Organ Symphony drops through the door. This version comes closely after a superb one by the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot, coupled with some purely orchestral Ravel (A/14). On this London Philharmonic disc, though, the organ is featured both in the Saint-Saëns and in Poulenc’s 1938 Concerto, spotlighting the restored Royal Festival Hall instrument at a concert with the organist James O’Donnell given in March this year as part of the ‘Pull Out All The Stops’ festival.

Organ aficionados will welcome all the historical and technical details that the booklet contains. The real test of the effectiveness of a performance of the Saint-Saëns, however, is not just a question of the organ part but of how well the whole symphony coheres structurally and how lucidly Saint-Saëns’s orchestration and textures are articulated. Yannick Nézet-Séguin scores well on most of those fronts, though he takes the second, Poco adagio section at well below the crotchet=60 marking, and detrimentally so. In the Poulenc Concerto, too, the third, Andante moderato section tends to drag. All in all, it is the faster music that seems to come off best, with a good rhythmic pulse in the Poulenc together with organ-playing of sensitivity and spark from O’Donnell, and with plenty of nervous energy, impetus and instrumental detail in the outer parts of the Saint-Saëns, ending with a gloriously shameless long pause on the final C major chord, followed by rapturous applause.