This new recording of orchestral music by Jean Françaix – personification of the elegant and witty French ‘salon’ ambience – brings us two ballets scores and the Concertino for piano and orchestra, one of the composer’s earliest successes, still one of his best-known compositions, and itself a model of the pithy-yet-polished style Françaix has so come to represent. The main work on this disc is the ballet score Les malheurs de Sophie, a setting of the eponymous French children’s tale of a naughty little girl, her escapades and misadventures. In three tableaux, Françaix’s score admirably encapsulates the capricious spirit of Sophie as she variously cuts up (and eats) her mother’s goldfish, holds a funeral for a favourite doll, shaves off her eyebrows … All in all the perfect subject-matter for the composer’s own brand of genial invention. Although the suite for wind ensemble the composer subsequently prepared has become something of a repertoire piece, the original orchestral score has remained frustratingly obscure until now. Les bosquets de Cythere (‘The groves of Cythera’) is Françaix’s development of a tradition which saw composers and poets from Debussy and Poulenc to Watteau and Boucher immortalizing the Bacchanalian, even Priapic, delights of this ‘island of love’. In his updated fantasy world abandoned shepherdesses lie quite happily with the minxes from the notorious Parisian restaurant Chez Maxim and all is couched in an ironic style charmingly blending the manners of a Couperin with those of the Roaring Twenties.

'Music so agreeably appealing needs no further comment from me, and when the performances are as idiomatic and perky as these, captured in such fine sound, the disc becomes self-recommending. Good, clean fun!' (www.classicstoday.com)

'The playing here is absolutely first class: rhythmically taut, clear and bright in texture, with a wide range in dynamics, spaciously but not echoingly recorded' (Gramophone)

'The immediacy and brilliance of Hyperion's recording of music by Jean Françaix brings to the three works a wonderful panoply of colour' (Essex Chronicle)

'Crisp, stylish performances' (Classic FM Magazine)

'It would be hard to imagine more persuasive perfomances than these nimble accounts by Fischer and his alert Ulster players. Good clean sound, too. Warmly recommended' (Fanfare, USA)

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Recording details: November 2002; Ulster Hall, Belfast, United Kingdom; Produced by Chris Hazell; Engineered by Simon Eadon; Release date: March 2004;