Describing the first movement of Saint-Saëns’s Septet, the baffling booklet-notes to this set maintain that “a sort of secret settles, a light melodious variation with very light arabesques, close to Schubert, but that the trumpet, decides to stop, without any pity nor sentimentality with a brief and malicious reminiscence of the Brandebourgeois Concerto No 5.” The English throughout reads as though generated automatically by computer (no French text is supplied), but fortunately these performances of Saint-Saëns’s wind music are graced with greater clarity. Not that the Septet is as crisp and well defined as it could be. A few more takes might have rendered the opening bars more incisive and elsewhere the ensemble sometimes teeters on the brink of being cloudy. But there is plenty of spirit to the playing and Frédéric Mellardi’s trumpeting is both polished and perky. There are one or two real oddities here, not least the transcriptions for contrabassoon of “The Swan” and “The Elephant” from The Carnival of the Animals – or “The Animal Carnaval”, as the notes would have it. If the contrabassoon makes a good jumbo-size substitute for the double bass in “The Elephant”, “The Swan” seems to be gliding through very murky waters, for all the liquid lyricism that Yves d’Hau brings to his playing of it.

All the musicians here are members of the Orchestre de Paris and they obviously relish the opportunities that Saint-Saëns offers to exploit tonal colour. The second CD includes the three sonatas that he composed when he was well into his eighties, drawing on a lifetime’s experience of writing idiomatically for a particular timbre and instrumental demeanour. The sonatas for oboe (Alexandre Gattet), clarinet (Philippe Berrod) and bassoon (Marc Trénel) brim with personality, Pascal Godart skilfully finding a mode of expression to match it on the piano. He shares the keyboard load with Laurent Wagschal, who on the first CD accompanies some rarities that give the trombone (Guillaume Cottet-Dumoulin) star billing in a lovely Cavatine and the horn (André Cazalet) a chance to shine in two Romances. It all makes for an attractive, worthwhile anthology.