This isn't music that yields its secrets easily. Despite pages pulsing with all Fauré's sustained radiance and energy, the abiding impression is of music of such profound introspection that you often feel like an interloper who's stumbled into a private conversation. But perseverance reaps the richest rewards, and moments like the opening of the D minor Quintet, where Fauré achieves what's referred to in the insert-notes as a 'rapt weightlessness', or the closing pages of the C minor Quintet's Andante moderato send out resonances that finally embrace the entire work.
The otherworldly dance beginning the finale of the First Quintet, the wild catch-as-catchcan opening and elfin close of the C minor Quintet's Allegro vivo, or the grave serenity of the following Andante moderato – all these are at the heart of Fauré's simultaneously conservative and radical genius. Simply as a person he remained conscious of an elusiveness that baffled and tantalised even his closest friends, companions who felt themselves gently but firmly excluded from his complex interior world. Domus fully suggests this enigma, yet plays with an ardour and élan that would surely have delighted the composer ('people play me as if the blinds were down'). The recordings are superb.

An outstanding issue