If you have ever wondered what four saxophones, a piano and a cello sound like, here’s your answer. It’s not something that’s ever been on my bucket list, but as it transpires the cello sits as comfortably and effectively with these unfamiliar partners as it does with the organ. The question arises, though, why anyone should want to hear Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations and a Vivaldi cello concerto played with this combination.

These six supremely accomplished musicians approach the project seriously, of course, but with a welcome light touch (‘Oh, believe me, we could blow you out of the concert hall at any time, my dear,’ jokes the Alliage Quintet’s soprano saxophonist Daniel Gauthier in the booklet’s lively introduction, ‘but we love the challenge of allowing the cello to shine as a solo instrument’). This is audibly a hugely enjoyable collaborative venture, the mellow warmth of the four saxophones and the contrasted tonal colouring of Jang Eun Bae’s piano providing a surprisingly convincing support for Gerhardt in the Tchaikovsky – ‘an entirely plausible chamber equivalent to Tchaikovsky’s orchestral virtuosity with his Classical orchestra’, as Francis Pott avers in his booklet note, even if the version is closer to Fitzhagen’s attenuated and reordered version than the composer’s original. I part company with arranger Stefan Malzew when, after Var 5, he takes us into a New York speakeasy for a bit of smoky 20th-century blues, for whose benefit I’m not sure. It’s a subjective matter.

What I think really doesn’t work is the Vivaldi, a piece of amiable, factory-produced diddle-diddle-diddle, to which the saxophone quartet brings an anachronistically muddy accompaniment at odds with the music’s crisp, darting character. I don’t necessarily need period strings and a harpsichord for Vivaldi but I do prefer clean, translucent textures.

The Falla suite and the three Shostakovich items, superbly played and most appealing, are the undoubted highlights of the disc. Their arrangers, Sebastian Gottschick (Falla), Levon Atovmian and Louis-Noël Fontaine (Shostakovich), rather than drawing attention to themselves, are completely at the service of the music, persuading you that this is how the scores were originally conceived. The programme ends with the eponymous Phantasy in Blue, another arrangement by Stefan Malzew. This employs Gershwin’s themes from his Rhapsody in Blue revoiced, reassigned and revamped. Interesting to hear once or twice, maybe, before filing under ‘discographical curiosity’.