Shortly after an outstanding release of the Piano Quintets from Naxos (9/09) comes another, superfine in sound and balance, from Chandos. And once more you are left to wonder at a rarefied poetic world, one where the composer seems to have severed earthly ties and entered a transcendental realm of a restless and unsettling beauty. Again, if the First Quintet’s soaring opening theme, emerging beneath the pianist’s spray of arpeggios, has an almost Franckian ardour, the shifting play of light and shade is wholly Fauréan. The archaic dance commencing the same Quintet’s finale (ungenerously described in the liner-notes as “four-square” when it is surely so much more) is another moment when the grateful listener can lay anchor, as it were, happy to pause among such a kaleidoscopic interplay of ideas. More generally, a feeling of elegy is countered, as so often with Fauré, by an immense underlying energy and at the end of the Second Quintet an exultant peal of bells that seems to say, “look, we have come through into the light”. Such complexity has baffled many listeners, and it is true that both works (particularly the Second Quintet) release their meaning and fragrance only with repeated listening. Certainly they require exceptionally dextrous and subtle performers and while I welcome the Schubert Ensemble’s clarity and musicianhip I missed a finer sense of the fantasy and inwardness shown by Cristina Ortiz and the Fine Arts Quartet, by the Domus Ensemble (Hyperion, 7/95) and most of all, by the inimitable Germaine Thyssens-Valentin on some ravishingly beautiful Charlin black discs, long overdue for CD release.