Fauré’s two piano quartets may be less advanced than the two later piano quintets but they are intricate and elusive compositions. This is never more true than in the Adagio non troppo of the Second Quartet, where beauty and vision combine to shake even the most blasé listener’s composure. A distant peal of bells gave rise in Fauré’s words to a sense of “something beyond what actually exists”. This together with the desolation felt after his father’s death creates one of music’s most profound elegies, never more so than in the final pages where the music seemingly spirals towards infinity. Preceded by a Scherzo of “extraordinary violence”, such writing is light years away from Fauré’s more urbane utterances.

This Scherzo, too, is significantly different to the First Quartet’s Scherzo where the spirit of the composer’s revered Saint-Saëns is transmuted into something as ethereal as it is sprightly. Kathryn Stott’s Fauré festival in Manchester remains a distant but cherished memory and her discography includes an ardent and characterful survey of the complete solo piano works. In the quartets she is more discreet though the overall reticence shown by her and her colleagues robs the music of too much of its underlying strength.

For her encore (her third recording of the Fourth Nocturne) Stott returns to her most positive form with a beguiling sense of Fauré’s sighing, lovelorn melancholy. Well recorded, the performances of the Quartets are excelled by the Domus Ensemble (Hyperion, 10/86), though I would urge readers to beg, borrow or steal an early RCA disc of Op 45 by the Festival Quartet (it included Szymon Goldberg and William Primrose) and Victor Babin, who are unforgettable in the Adagio non troppo.