Saint-Saëns’s acute ear for the personality of particular instruments is nowhere more conspicuous than in the three sonatas that he composed in the last year of his life, 1921. These final forays into the realms of chamber music also show Saint-Saëns winnowing his style, so that, while still having recourse to the generous fund of lyricism on which he had always been able to capitalise, he now wrote with conscious economy of means.

The members of Canada’s National Arts Centre Wind Quintet appreciate and convey these facets in performances that encapsulate the Gallic charm and finesse of the music. At the same time, the Oboe Sonata’s mix of the pastoral and the perky is nicely established, as is the blend of warmth and bravura in the Clarinet Sonata, with its lowest register explored in the solemn Lento movement and its capacity for exuberance in the finale. In the Bassoon Sonata, Saint-Saëns again reveals his ability to write music of a character individually tailored to the instrument’s timbre and tonal palette, here within the context of piece that takes Baroque compositional principles as a model.

The unifying feature of this programme is the excellently judged piano playing of Stéphane Lemelin, who adds a discerning range of colour and spirit to the performances, whether in the sonatas or in the lovely Romance for horn, the lively Tarantella for flute and clarinet, or the Caprice on Danish and Russian Airs, which Saint-Saëns dedicated to the Danish-born wife of Russia’s Tsar Alexander III.