After Karajan’s two-year, fly-by-night tenure at the helm of the Orchestre de Paris, the orchestra was looking for a music director of potentially equal standing but greater commitment. Step forward Daniel Barenboim, who had already made waves over the other side of the Atlantic with his concerts and recordings at the helm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, succeeding in the process in fashioning interpretations of tremendous sweep, richness and splendour and harnessing the legendary sound of the orchestra, especially its brass section, towards more malleable, less driven goals than the orchestra’s long-standing music director, Sir Georg Solti.

Among Barenboim’s most notable recordings in Chicago were of symphonies by Schumann, Bruckner and Saint-Saëns: composers of great relevance when considering the heady, Franco-German aesthetic of the Belgian composer-organist César Franck. Franck was, of course, first and foremost a Wagner epigone, who translated the German master’s heady chromaticism into clouds of musical incense.

The Symphony is a three movement work of continuous development and long threads of melody. Psyché is a multi-movement tone poem telling an erotic story of Classical legend. The complete version includes obligatory wordless female chorus (think Ravel’s Daphnis and Pierné's Cydalise et le Chèvre-pied, as well as Debussy’s Nocturnes). This version, as is commonly done, shaves off the choral movements.