‘Gabriel Fauré, still relatively unfamiliar to the general public, deserves a glory similar to that enjoyed by the greatest French Impressionist painters.’ So wrote Gerard Souzay in an early 1960s album note, long before the half-dozen (or more) complete cycles of Fauré song recordings. This particular disc concludes Malcolm Martineau’s second go around with the composer’s 100-plus songs, this time adding selected vocalises written for academic purposes but forgotten until 2013. Complete cycles make sense for this composer: Fauré’s more modest efforts truly gather strength from close proximity to the great cycles on which the composer’s reputation rests. While Graham Johnson’s four separate volumes of Fauré songs on Hyperion are sequenced chronologically by composition dates (making each disc a different journey from Fauré’s early parlour style to his meditative final years), Martineau’s more intuitively arranged fourth volume contains two creative peaks, La bonne chanson and L’horizon chimérique, on the same disc.

Vocal casting has gone from a pair of high-personality voices (such as Tom Krause and Sarah Walker on Martineau’s 1990s earlier set on CRD) to a generally smaller-voiced, seven-member collective, similar in spirit to Johnson’s set, with up-and-coming John Chest and Kitty Whately, veterans Isobel Buchanan and Ann Murray, plus the seasoned mid-career singers Iestyn Davies, Sarah Connolly and John Mark Ainsley. Recording the singers individually over a span of several years, Martineau has a bank of songs that allows Connolly, the dominant presence in Vol 2, to make a welcome cameo appearance in Vol 4’s ‘Prison’.

Results are mixed in this casting – in ways that say much about the nature of Fauré. No matter if Davies’s countertenor voice isn’t anything the composer would have imagined in his music: his elegant artistry in ‘Nocturne’ is among the disc’s best moments. Anderson projects a near-perfect marriage of voice, text and meaning in ‘Les présents’. Ainsley delivered some of the more robust singing on the Johnson sets, which can still work with demure Fauré, though here he slips into the Puccini zone with grating effect in ‘Larmes’.

Oddly, the mature interpretative instincts that so benefit Hugo Wolf are of limited use in Fauré. Surface sheen isn’t to be found in Buchanan’s emotionally deep but disappointingly laboured ‘L’absent’. But sheen to spare doesn’t really help in Whately’s well-schooled but somewhat impersonal La bonne chanson – though the rich harmonic voicing in Martineau’s pianism is a major plus throughout the disc but especially in this harmonically adventurous work. With their often dated texts and understated manner, Fauré’s songs are best inhabited rather than interpreted. That’s what one hears in Chest’s L’horizon chimérique that, in its way, feels more honest than the suave Christopher Maltman on the Johnson set.

Johnson’s Hyperion sets, especially Vols 1 and 3 (5/05, 8/05), are also uneven but the dominant presence of Maltman, generally at his considerable best, as well as Felicity Lott and Jean-Paul Fouchécourt plus extensive notes give the Hyperion releases the edge. For classic recordings, the Diapason compilation with Souzay, Suzanne Danco, Irma Kolassi and Charles Panzera (the dedicatee of L’horizon chimérique) is a great historical reference.