‘I will make something powerful, grandiose and strong, which will stir in the heart of hearts of fathers the deepest fibres of love for a dead son.’ Just a few minutes of Vierne’s Quintet are enough to make these words, written in February 1918 to his friend and teacher Maurice Blazy, seem an understatement rather than hyperbole.

Born almost blind, Vierne struggled all his life with failing sight. Shortly before composing the Quintet, the condition worsened, imposing a long period of absence from his post as organist at Notre Dame. He had already lost a son to tuberculosis, and his wife to adultery. But the coup de grâce came with the death of his other son, aged 17, at the front in the Great War. Theories differ on the cause, which may have been suicide or even execution for refusing to fight. But Vierne also had to carry the guilt of having himself arranged the paperwork for his son’s drafting when still a minor. Shortly after the completion of the Quintet in May 1918, Vierne’s brother, René, was killed – ‘pulverised’, as reports put it, by a shell.

The three-movement Quintet, for all its classical structure and the omnipresent shadow of Vierne’s harmony teacher, César Franck, never feels contrived or calculated. Éric Le Sage and the Schumann Quartet allow enough room for the music to grow organically and to register fully the alternation between tenderness and throat-grabbing anguish, while optimal balance facilitates the often violent exchanges between piano and strings. From the Lisztian chromatic piano opening and the shell-shocked response from the strings, to the floating numbness of the lullaby-like quartet in the second movement, to that movement’s heart-rending climax, to the violence of the stabbing piano chords of the finale, every grief-stricken stage in this most poignant testament to wartime loss is unerringly delineated.

Notwithstanding the common Wagner/Franck heritage, this is all a far cry from the hedonistic turn-of-the-century opulence of Chausson’s Concert. Here the ensemble is joined by Daishin Kashimoto, leader of the Berlin Philharmonic and recording partner with Le Sage in Fauré’s sonatas (Alpha, 7/14), whose warm-toned elegance is a perfect fit for Chausson’s voluptuous romanticism. All six artists fearlessly negotiate the awkwardness of the hybrid medium (a concerto grosso, perhaps, more than a sextet), not to mention the bone-twisting perversity of the piano-writing. Textures are shimmeringly transparent, especially in the breath of the fresh air that comes with the Fauré-esque siciliano second movement. Compared to Bolet, Perlman and the Juilliards – responsive and virtuosic though they are – there is still greater urgency and drive, and a more youthful energy, always responsive to the broader dramatic arc.

Definitely, then, a disc that invites and repays repeated listening: especially, for me, the Vierne, which now has a firm place in my heart of hearts.