During his years with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra from 2005 to 2012, Stéphane Denève devoted much of his recording time to the Naxos discs of Roussel’s symphonies. Now that he is in charge of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra he seems to be carrying on with the French repertoire but has turned his attention to Ravel. This is the second volume in a series that started last year with Boléro, La valse, Le tombeau de Couperin, Alborada del grazioso and the Rapsodie espagnole (2/14).

Here, the main works are Ma Mère l’Oye and Pavane pour une infante défunte but there are also some rarities, including Shéhérazade – not the well-known song-cycle of 1903 but a substantial, 13-minute overture written in 1898 for an abandoned opera based on the Arabian Nights. Ravel largely disowned it later on, voicing his particular dislike of the welter of whole-tone scales that conjure up the subject’s exotic atmosphere, but in fact it’s not at all bad. Maybe it lacks later sophistication and might serve more satisfactorily as a symphonic picture than as an opera overture but it bears many of Ravel’s familiar hallmarks, not least in matters of luminous orchestration, which Denève and the Stuttgart orchestra interpret with animation and with persuasive ideas about the music’s dramatic rise and fall. The other works, too, testify to Denève’s experience in this music, with colours finely etched in, a fluidity of movement and a real sense that he has his finger firmly on the Ravel pulse.