Completed in 1911, Évocations was the work that put Albert Roussel on the musical map at its premiere a year later. The first of his scores to be inspired by his honeymoon tour of India in 1909, its three movements successively depict the caves at Ellora, the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur and the Ganges as it flows through the sacred city of Benares. Though it reveals a fertile musical imagination at work, it’s not quite a masterpiece. Roussel’s harmonic and melodic language, with its unresolved chromatic suspensions and Orientalist flourishes, is strikingly novel but not as adventurous as his 1918 opera Padmâvatî, in which traditional Indian music is indelibly woven into the score’s fabric. The choral finale, meanwhile, setting a text by Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi in three sections of unequal length (a love scene, a baritone aria and a hymn to the sun), comes over as episodic. Against that, however, must be set the originality of Roussel’s orchestration, in which sensuality rubs shoulders with abrasion and dark-hued textures repeatedly intrude upon Impressionist transparency.

Yan Pascal Tortelier’s recording, made live at Birmingham’s Symphony Hall last year, marks its first appearance on disc since Michel Plasson’s 1988 EMI version with the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra and Orfeón Donostiarra. Both are exceptionally fine, though Tortelier offers the more dramatic interpretation, finding danger as well as beauty in the score. The BBC Philharmonic’s dark-sounding brass suggest dread as well as awe at the sight of the Ellora caves, where Plasson is calmly majestic, and the militaristic fanfares that interrupt the chattering woodwind of the Jaipur scherzo similarly carry deeper intimations of menace in Tortelier’s performance. In the final movement, he presses forwards with greater urgency and has marginally the more focused choir in the CBSO Chorus. Tortelier’s soloists are every bit as good as Plasson’s starrier line-up (Nathalie Stutzmann, Nicolai Gedda, José van Dam), though the Chandos recording places François Le Roux close to the microphones and Kathryn Rudge and Alessandro Fisher too far back.

The companion pieces, both encapsulating the harder-edged style Roussel adopted after the First World War, were recorded in the orchestra’s Salford studio. Pour une fête de printemps, elegant yet dissonant, started life as the Second Symphony’s scherzo before Roussel decided its length was out of proportion to the rest of the score and published it as a separate piece. Tortelier is wonderfully alert to its mercurial shifts in mood and occasional hints of violence. He drives the outer movements of the Suite in F very hard, meanwhile, only relaxing the tension in the central Sarabande with its unnerving melody that never quite goes where you expect, even after repeated hearings. The playing here is exemplary in its rhythmic precision and detail, with all those tricky brass and woodwind solos finely honed and dexterously done.