They use solo voices throughout, mixed voices with a fairly open sound that brings with it more vibrato than we are used to hearing in such music nowadays. The requirements of the intégrale also mean that there is less of a tendency to linger over the many juicy dissonances in this music. That results in performances that are refreshingly free of self indulgence. Some of the big Byrd pieces in particular are very good indeed. David Fallows 

Orchestral charm and craftsmanship revealed in a fine Philharmonic recital 

...pride of place must surely go to the Piano Concerto, clearly inspired by SaintSaëns’s Second Piano Concerto, though with a scintillating character of its own. Only a puritan could resist the second-movement Scherzando, where a jaunty theme is sent spinning through a maze of sparkling Christmas-tree elaboration. There is alternating grandeur and frivolity in the finale which Bavouzet (fresh from triumphs in his Bartók and Ravel concerto recordings) plays with an enthralling virtuosity. Here and elsewhere he makes it difficult to imagine a more bright-eyed and eloquent soloist, and his partners work with him hand-in-glove. For all those who delight in a wholly French grace and magic, this disc is a winner, and it is superbly recorded.
- Bryce Morrison

Gallic charm and exuberance in chamber works from the end of Saint-Saëns’s life 

Saint-Saëns’s acute ear for the personality of particular instruments is nowhere more conspicuous than in the three sonatas that he composed in the last year of his life, 1921. These final forays into the realms of chamber music also show Saint-Saëns winnowing his style, so that, while still having recourse to the generous fund of lyricism on which he had always been able to capitalise, he now wrote with conscious economy of means.