Though Louise Farrenc’s chamber music, much of it long neglected, has gradually been restored to the repertory in recent years, we have yet, perhaps, to appreciate her achievement as an orchestral composer, so this album from Christoph König and the Solistes Européens, a companion to their previous recording of Farrenc’s Second and Third Symphonies (2018), goes some way towards redressing the balance.

Her First Symphony, dating from 1842 and a striking amalgam of Romanticism and Classicism, is indebted in some ways to the German symphonic tradition, yet at the same time reveals an individual voice of considerable originality. There are glances in the direction of Beethoven in the first movement, and Schumann in the finale. In place of the expected scherzo, however, Farrenc offers a Minuet, though its slightly abrasive tone takes us into territory far removed from retro 18th-century pastiche. The taut structure offsets an often remarkable volatility of mood until the scampering finale sweeps the tensions away, and throughout, you’re struck both by the inventiveness of Farrenc’s thematic and melodic writing and by the surety of her orchestration.

The overtures that accompany it, meanwhile, date from 1834 and sound very much like the opening movements of symphonic works that remained incomplete. In both you notice the same volatility and tautness. The swirling energy of the Second was much admired by Berlioz in its day, though the anxious, reined-in quality of the First, in E minor, creates the greater impact. The disc is rounded off with the concertante Grandes variations on a theme by Count Robert von Gallenberg, a popular Austrian ballet composer of the time, which are perhaps less successful. Farrenc was a well-known piano virtuoso in her lifetime and the demands placed on the soloist are considerable. But the theme itself is ornate and florid, giving the pianist too little room for expressive manoeuvre as the variations progress.

You sense König’s commitment to this repertory throughout, in interpretations that delve into the dramas of this music with a combination of restless energy and refinement. Farrenc’s sometimes melancholy woodwind-writing, often for pairs of instruments in close counterpoint, is beautifully served by the Luxembourg players, while the weighty dexterity of the strings ensures that the Symphony’s finale and the E flat Overture are exhilaratingly done. Jean Muller is the muscular soloist in the Grandes variations, which gets a performance here of some considerable panache that doesn’t quite dispel the work’s moments of stolidity. The recording itself is admirably spacious and carefully balanced.