There’s a tempting-looking television documentary that is right up your street. So tempting, in fact, that you decide to video it at the same time as watching the live transmission. It starts off promisingly, your anticipation fulfilled. Thank goodness you are recording this, because you can now return to it at your leisure for future viewings. After 15 minutes, your interest has dropped. Half-an-hour later, you’re feeling decidedly uninterested, stop the video recording, rewind the tape and change channels.

That, I’m afraid, was my response to these two symphonies, probably the earliest ever written by an Englishwoman, the C minor Symphony premiered in 1863, the A minor Symphony, composed under a pseudonym, completed in 1876.

Alice Mary Smith (1839-84), born into a well-to-do London family and later known under her married name of Mrs Meadows White, was a pupil of Sterndale Bennett and Macfarren whose own Mendelssohnian credentials were all too clearly passed on to Miss Smith. The A minor, presented first on this disc, is the better work with an attractive opening movement in traditional sonata form. It might stand (and even survive) independently as an overture, but the rest of the Symphony – and the earlier C minor – sound like a succession of wordless Victorian parlour songs orchestrated in the manner of Mendelssohn and, presciently, Sullivan. Indeed, several themes might be straight from a G&S opera though the melodic material is frequently banal and almost devoid of counterpoint.

Even the mellifluous Angela Malsbury cannot quite rescue the orchestral version of the Andante from Smith’s 1872 Clarinet Sonata, though it is pretty enough and makes a pleasant sandwich filler. In short, while tipping my hat to Shelley and his polite-sounding players for letting us hear this British female pioneer, the most remarkable thing about this enterprising release is its historical rather than musical interest.