''I traditionally associate Hortus Edition with organ music. They do it well and with a dash of élan and plenty of authority. Here then is one of their rare forays into orchestral music.  
Paris-born composer Chamouard has written nine symphonies and many concertos including ones for koto, celtic harp, trumpet, cello and violin. Both Maurice André and Ennio Morricone have encouraged Chamouard to pursue his search for a musical language common to composer, interpreter and audience. If you want a further profile then please refer to my earlier feature review of some of the French composer's other symphonies.   We are confronted on this occasion with a substantial symphony in four movements for full orchestra and an overture sized Poem for string orchestra. The evidence of our ears has the composer standing revealed as an unabashed romantic melodist. This does not mean an undifferentiated wash of superficially attractive sound. Instead we have a composer whose writing is never less than emotionally taut and sometimes intense. The music has its darkly dramatic episodes but shares DNA with the film world in its vividly coloured progress and lyrical gifts.   Big zaftig themes are there among the pages of the epic first movement Moderato of the Symphony. After a dazzling, jazzily intriguing and ringingly dynamic marcato scherzo section the composer is drawn back to the romantic lushness of the first movement only to return to a jazzily Lambert-like emphatic episode. The Grave third movement has that feeling of coming home. It's taut and tense with something approaching foreboding. At 3.15 the bagpipes enter played by François Marchal giving voice to Amazing Grace. This element is artfully woven, without elaboration, into the tense and dense orchestral canvas. The bagpipes fade to silence at 7.20 and the orchestra, plangent and atmospheric, returns. This is calming music of slow dripping and centred self-benediction. The final Largo Cantabile addresses the listener in deep lunged paragraphs with themes that teeter on edge of the elongated main theme in Herrmann's Marnie. It’s glowingly attractive in an almost Mahlerian way - Chamouard has written about Mahler. The symphony ends in a great surging up-wash of sound.  
The gentle and unassertive Poème du Vent is founded on a poem by Oshikhoshi Mitsume. Again there are some echoes here of Mahler's Adagietto and of Herrmann's elite cantabile writing for strings: beauty and melancholy contending at close quarters.   This is another fine and unconventional entry in the annals of the symphony in the 20th and 21st centuries.'' MusicWeb International