For her third Somm recording, Valerie Tryon turns to France, doubtless recalling her early studies in Paris with Jacques Février. And if the times are past when she tossed aside the difficulties of such daunting fare as Balakirev’s Islamey and Liszt’s Feux follets with nonchalant ease, she retains much of her impeccable musicianship, her grace and fluency.

Debussy, who could take a peevish view of his own as well as other people’s music, was dismissive concerning his Fantaisie, yet its intricate and scintillating interplay between piano and orchestra, with an intriguing hint of ‘Fêtes’ from the orchestral Nocturnes, makes for a special sense of pastoral enchantment. And here Tryon is as warmly sympathetic as she is delightfully frisky in the final Allegro molto’s opening.

Her Fauré is subtly rather than boldly inflected and as on so many other occasions she makes it hard to imagine playing less interventionist or more unassuming. At the same time, her way with Fauré’s shimmering, bird-haunted landscape can be sober to the point of plainness and her Ravel Concerto, too, is what painters call ‘low in tone’, with a notably subfusc view of the very Spanish flavours of the first movement’s second subject.

And yet, if you need to look elsewhere for a more fiercely projected and volatile view of all three works (Gieseking in the Debussy, Louis Lortie in the Fauré and most of all Argerich in the Ravel, to say nothing of youthful Benjamin Grosvenor), you may well pause to wonder at playing of an often moving poetic restraint and simplicity. Expertly partnered, finely balanced and recorded, Tryon’s playing has a haunting after-effect, recalled ‘long after it was heard no more’.