For my money, there is every good reason for Debussy’s Fantaisie for piano and orchestra to establish more of a toehold on today’s repertoire, whether recorded or live, but this new disc triggers a dilemma. On the one hand, it is part of Naxos’s valuable continuing series of Debussy’s orchestral music, coupling the Fantaisie with three other works for solo instrument and orchestra, the Première Rapsodie for clarinet, another Rapsodie that Debussy wrote with wan dilatoriness for saxophone, and the Danse sacrée et Danse profane for harp and strings. On that count, there is virtue in the disc’s programme, with a lovely, supple performance of the clarinet Rapsodie from Paul Meyer, fully equal to the technical and expressive demands that Debussy enshrined in a piece written as a Paris Conservatoire competition test. Alexandre Doisy plays with a nice mix of spice and smoothness in the saxophone Rapsodie, and the wonderful Emmanuel Ceysson brings both enchantment and spirit to the two harp Danses.

The trouble with the performance of the piano-and-orchestra Fantaisie is that it does not really measure up to the one by Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, reviewed here last year and recently given a richly deserved Gramophone Award. Bavouzet places the Fantaisie together with the two Ravel concertos, so the reasons to buy are perhaps different, but Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s fluid playing lacks Bavouzet’s finesse and the Orchestre National de Lyon, while polished, is not a match for the BBC SO’s scintillating detail.