Saint-Saëns’s piano concertos have been well served on disc in recent years, not least by Bertrand Chamayou’s double Gramophone Award last year for Best Concerto and Recording of the Year, and by Alexandre Kantorow’s traversal of concertos Nos 3, 4 and 5 on a single disc. The present disc is the second volume of Saint-Saëns’s works for piano and orchestra, to the first of which (with Concertos Nos 1, 2 and 4) I gave a guarded welcome in October 2018. Re-reading my comments, I cannot but repeat the same merits and reservations.

Lortie is a wonderfully gifted artist, able to generate live performance electricity in the studio, aided and abetted by a conductor who brings a muscular energy to proceedings – and who relishes the details of Saint-Saëns’s orchestration, frequently a little too much. Tempos in the two concertos are on the fast side, nearer to Stephen Hough than to Jean-Marie Darré, Chamayou and Kantorow, who all take slightly broader views. There is no getting away from the fact that Lortie can be tremendously exciting with his thunderous octaves and swashbuckling engagement with the orchestra, but it’s all a bit in-your-face and relentless. You feel that he has been compelled to compete with Gardner’s enthusiastic accompaniment in which secondary material (woodwind riffs in the Third Concerto, for example, string motifs in the first movement of the Fifth) are allowed to take precedence over the piano’s primary role. And just listen to the beginning of the last movement of the Egyptian, where the basic pulse is too lightly defined, and to the final page, where Lortie and his piano, on the verge of triumph, are cruelly stamped underfoot by Gardner and his band.

This is not a poor recording by any means, but for me it lacks refinement and that essential Gallic light touch and tone which are heard to more advantage in the other recordings mentioned.