The second volume of Louis Lortie’s series of Fauré recitals offers the kind of solace that repays repeated hearings, with the prospect of enjoyment increasing with each one.

As in the first volume, Lortie incorporates his own transcriptions of Fauré’s best-known works, here the ‘Pie Jesu’ and the ‘In paradisum’ from the Requiem, each prepared and executed with love and care. They bookend works from various periods of the composer’s life, from the romantic early Ballade in F sharp minor to the enigmatic and unsettling Nocturne No 13, which was Fauré’s farewell to piano solo music. Lortie injects each episode of the Ballade with youthful exuberance and lust for life, as much as he yearns for lost youth and life in the fervent pleas of the Nocturne. I still have a slight preference for the shy introversion Germaine Thyssens-Valentin brings to the opening (Testament, 8/02). But let’s just accept that she is the unattainable zenith, the woman with direct access to the heart of Fauré’s music.

Here and elsewhere I have some reservations about the immediacy of the Fazioli, and I wonder whether Lortie’s poetry might have resonated even better through a warmer and more rounded piano sound. But he certainly makes a much better case for the instrument than Angela Hewitt (Hyperion, 9/13). Where Hewitt plods through the Theme of the C sharp minor Theme and Variations, Lortie endows it with a sense of inevitability and goes on to bring far greater coherence and drama to the piece as a whole.

On the other hand, it might be said that the very unevenness of the Fazioli serves to enhance the unpredictability of Fauré’s musical language. Lortie certainly excels in giving the illusion of continuous improvisation; take the unexpected harmonic glides in the Barcarolle No 12, which in his hands sound as natural complements to the rocking rhythm, as if the harmony is shifting with the gondolier’s strokes. Compare this to Pierre-Alain Volondat’s erratic rendition (Naxos, 11/96), where the limping rhythm is slanted to the point of mockery. It is Lortie’s sincerity and naturalness, infused with the utmost sensitivity and a wide colouristic palette, that makes him a star shining only a fraction less brightly than the uneclipsed Thyssens-Valentin.