It’s the musical surprise of the year, and it will probably go down like a concrete bassoon in Berlin. But there it is. Times readers have eschewed the profundity of Herbert von Karajan’s Mahler. They have turned their backs on the insights of Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Beethoven. And they have snubbed the sublime Beaux Arts Trio playing Haydn.

Instead, they have voted a recording of little-known piano concertos by a minor-league French composer, performed by a British pianist who is a household name only in his own household, as their top classical CD of the past 30 years. It is a victory of connoisseurs over rampant populists.

It’s a wonderful accolade for a recording that opened my ears to the delights of a composer I had previously considered as fluffy as a feather-duster. Camille Saint-Saëns might have lived through the ages of Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler and Wagner, but temperamentally and creatively the Frenchman was in a different universe from those Teutonic heavyweights. Where their music stirred the soul, his seduced the senses. It is elegant, sexy, stylish, witty and glittery – the epitome of Gallic chic.

The five piano concertos cover a surprising range of moods, from the wistful melancholy of some slow movements to the exhilarating note rush of the Third, depicting a waterfall, and the exotica of the Fifth, inspired by a jaunt to Egypt.

It’s hard to imagine them performed with more charm or verve than by Stephen Hough and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Sakari Oramo. Hough, 46, is the sort of unostentatious virtuoso who is usually overlooked when the awards bus comes calling. So it’s poetic (or perhaps pianistic) justice that he should now be acclaimed as the “best of the best”.

Saint-Saëns, meanwhile, has always been the butt of snide jokes. When he declared in 1916 that he was increasing his output of songs as his contribution to France’s military effort, Ravel riposted that it would be better if he increased his output of artillery shells as his contribution to France’s musical life. With this sublime recording, perhaps, his time has come.

Explore Music

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

• Classical

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010