Tchaikovsky’s Serenade and Bartók’s Divertimento go well together, their liveliness and ease of invention concealing the brilliance and ingenuity of the craftsmanship. Tchaikovsky was ‘terribly in love’ with his work, he told his publisher, ‘a piece from the heart’. The variety and subtlety of the textures make demands not only on performers but on the recording process, and all is well managed here. Simovic sets the Serenade off in stately, ceremonial style, drawing great warmth and depth of tone from the orchestra, but then raises the curtain, as it were, on marvellously subtle inventive patterns from which a sense of the footlights is never very far away. The Waltz, one of Tchaikovsky’s best, and played with a delightful lilt here, confirms the balletic nature of the invention; and the slow movement, marked ‘Elegy’ but intentionally not one of his most profound, is warmly and lyrically played. The finale, maintaining the dance element as the players well understand, draws on a couple of folksongs in a manner that enraged the Vienna critic Eduard Hanslick (‘crude…a diminutive theme spins as monotonously as a top’), and here has the lively kick to it which it well merits.

Bartók’s Divertimento is also charged with a sense of the dance, and has a comparable sense of enjoyment. Despite having been written in the tense months before he was forced to emigrate, the piece shares Tchaikovsky’s sense of relish in its making, and the sense of an 18th-century concerto grosso is sustained when, brilliantly enjoyed by the players here, Bartók dives headlong into a double fugue.