This is the first volume in Louis Lortie’s new series devoted to the music of Gabriel Fauré.

As he states in the booklet notes, ‘this album purposely travels through Fauré's various creative periods, from easily appealing early pieces such as the Pavane and the mélodie “Après un rêve” through to the late and unjustly neglected Préludes, a masterpiece of condensed harmonic and melodic audacity.’

Released after four volumes in an ongoing Chopin series – ‘an exceptionally high order of playing’ (BBC Music) – this album, besides the masterful late Op. 103 Préludes, unsurprisingly features in Lortie’s words ‘the romantic, post-Chopinesque genres of the Nocturnes and Barcarolles along with pathbreaking small forms of neoclassical aesthetics such as the suite from Pelléas et Mélisande, here in a solo piano version highlighting the ambiguity of a canvas of pianistic and orchestral colourings that would be a major influence on Fauré’s successors’.