Mark Elder and the Hallé’s Debussy recordings for the orchestra’s own label have, until now, been centred round Colin Matthews’s transcriptions of the Préludes, undertaken at the Hallé’s request between 2001 and 2006. This new disc is much more straightforward, though it does give us a further Matthews transcription in Les soirs illuminés par l’ardeur du charbon, Debussy’s last piano piece, written in February 1917 for his musically minded coal merchant, in the hope that the latter would give him enough fuel to keep warm. The opening theme now drifts upwards in parallel clarinet thirds, while the central melody turns heady on divided strings. The original is arguably more bittersweet in mood, but like the Préludes transcriptions, this is both extremely beautiful and very fine.

The disc’s main raisons d’être, however, are Nocturnes and La damoiselle élue. The former, recorded live, is particularly strong, with a real sense of desolation – ‘a grey agony tinged with white’, as Debussy put it – at the end of ‘Nuages’, and a genuine throb of excitement in ‘Fêtes’, where steady speeds allow the gaudy textures to register fully. Where some interpreters are apt to linger, Elder presses forwards in ‘Sirènes’, which is really seductive, with ravishing string- and woodwind-playing and exquisite singing from the sopranos and altos of the Hallé Choir and Youth Choir.

The choral singing similarly impresses in La damoiselle élue, particularly at the sudden, ecstatic surge of emotion as the choir contemplates the reunion in heaven of lovers separated on earth. The orchestral sound is very sensuous and transparent: you may prefer the darker Wagnerian resonance and greater gravitas of Abbado and the LSO here. Anna Stéphany is the detached récitante, Sophie Bevan the sorrowing Damozel, though, in order, one suspects, to emphasise her isolation, she’s placed fractionally too far forwards. She drops some of her consonants, too, so it’s a shame the accompanying booklet gives us neither the French text nor the equivalent lines from Rossetti’s original poem.

Along with Les soirs illuminés, the fillers are the Marche écossaise and the clarinet Rapsodie, written in 1910 as a test piece for Conservatoire students. Fearsomely difficult for the soloist with its extreme range and constant shifts of tempo and mood, its challenges are impeccably met by the Hallé’s principal clarinettist Sergio Castelló López. The Marche, meanwhile, though slight, has plenty of elegance and joie de vivre. It’s all well worth hearing, Nocturnes above all.