La muse et le poète for violin, cello and orchestra is, compared with the other two works on this disc, late Saint-Saëns, composed in 1909 when he was in his early seventies. But there is no diminishing of creative energy nor, indeed, any marked diversion from the style familiar from the First Cello Concerto, written more than three decades previously. He deploys the solo instruments with the panache and the wisdom that reliably informed his concertos, tapping their capacity both for elegiac lyricism and for romantic flourish, qualities that Augustin Dumay and Pavel Gomziakov interpret with finesse and flair. The title was invented not by Saint-Saëns but by his publisher Durand, in the hope that the idea of a muse inspiring a poet would make the 16-minute piece more marketable than by merely calling it a double concerto or, as it was originally conceived, a piano trio. It has proved a useful filler on other recordings and Dumay, Gomziakov and the Japanese orchestra (conducted by Sachio Fujioka) eloquently make its case here as music of spirit and charm.

Dumay turns conductor for the Cello Concerto, a performance in which the contrasts between fast and slow music are a touch too extreme to make for an entirely compelling view of the concerto’s overall perspective, but there is plenty of personality to Gomziakov’s playing and the orchestra is deft and colourful. The First Symphony, for all its debts to Schumann and Mendelssohn, testifies to the teenage Saint-Saëns’s precocious talents, here animatedly projected.