Symphony-lite was something of a French speciality in the 1920s. And as an adopted Parisian, Polish-born Alexandre Tansman helped to fashion the recipe for it, transferring smart Ravelian urbanity into a genre where Ravel himself (Tansman’s mentor, incidentally) never ventured. At their weakest – in Tansman’s later symphonies – the results can seem like mere note-spinning; but at best they represent interesting attempts to develop a new kind of divertimento-style symphonism, for which ample historical precedent could be cited.

This new disc continues Chandos’s valuable survey of all nine Tansman symphonies with the acidulous Second (1926), composed for and premiered by Koussevitzky just before his move to Boston (where he included the piece in his new orchestra’s first radio broadcast), and the curious Third (1931) – curious for the concertante role allotted to the string quartet and for its catchy tribute to Gershwin in the Tempo americano second movement.

The Quatre mouvements sound like the work of a different composer. Thirty-six years on, at the age of 70, Tansman was still open to the latest sounds on the block, in this case the sonoristic layers of his fellow-countrymen, above all Lutosawski. That did not stop him continuing to indulge in his trademark polychords, or from including, in the Toccata finale, an outrageous rip-off of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. All good clean fun, but probably just as well Stravinsky’s lawyers didn’t get to hear of it.

Performances and recording are admirable, making this an attractive disc – undemanding, maybe, but by no means trivial.