The Concertino is a sprightly, vigorous work with a surprisingly youthful sound for a composer in ill health who had only a year to live. The slow movement doesn't dominate, as it does in many of Roussel's works; but it opens with intriguing, otherworldly chords reminiscent of such works as Pour une fete de printemps and the Serenade. The cello has its grandest moments in the final movement in a long, cadenza-like solo that begins unaccompanied, only to be joined by the oboe.

All in all, the Concertino is a pleasant, if rather light-weight, example of Roussel's orchestral writing. He also created a version for piano and cello.

This not-very-lengthy work... features the best characteristics of Roussel's mature style. It has a traditionally based ground-plan, classically sober orchestration, a tendency toward polyphonic stratification of the voices, rich even if inconspicuous melodic invention, rare proportionality and cultured expression. [Isa Popelka]

A number of Roussel adagios: the prelude to the Suite in F#, Concerto for piano or the Concertino for cello, are directly linked to death. An explosion of rediscovered vitality always follows their painful brevity. [Damien Top]

This twelve-minute work is direct and immediately comprehensible. It does not demand a virtuosic technique either from the orchestra or the soloist, and, like the Sinfonietta, is accessible to good amateur performers. [Basil Deane]

The allegro molto, in the form of a rondo, has a happy, alert character. [Catalogue de l'oeuvre d'Albert Roussel]