Pianist Anne de Fornel is the impressive constant factor, capturing the refined emotional nuances of these exquisite works, while mezzo-soprano Lucile Richardot takes the lion’s share of the 55 songs. Beguiling from her first entry in Nadia’s ‘Mon coeur’, she is convincing throughout.

The singing from all three performers is uniformly excellent on this enterprising set, which features a handful of world premiere recordings. Anne de Fornel provides rich, impressive, and imaginative support for her singers, as well as for the several chamber pieces, which I have to say are splendid.

an insightful, historically significant tour of two of 20th-century France’s great musical minds.

The lion’s share of the songs is here assigned to the French mezzo Lucile Richardot, who mines every nuance of these texts (by poets including Verlaine, Maeterlinck, Samain and Silvestre) for all their worth. The pianist throughout is the ever-imaginative Anne de Fornel, who makes much of the almost minimalist ostinatos and rippling arpeggio motifs which Nadia so favoured and also rises superbly to the challenges of the more virtuosic writing... it all adds up to a classy celebration of the sisters’ legacies.

Both sisters’ writing for voice is steeped in the tradition of Fauré and Debussy, but they are wont to roam. Lili’s is perhaps the more tempestuous and, conversely, contained (the song cycle Clairières dans le ciel is breathtaking), but Nadia’s, to texts by Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, Maurice Maeterlinck and others, can be tantalising…Fascinating.

Thanks to excellent performances, we can reconstruct the separate fates of Lili, a talent who died young, and Nadia, who as a teacher left an indelible mark on 20th century music, and whose school (la boulangerie) was a point of reference for all musicians going to Paris.