By the time Fauré finished his Second Piano Quintet in the early spring of 1921 he was almost completely deaf, and all he could hear of the first performance that May was the ecstatic applause afterwards. It’s more than possible that, as with Beethoven, deafness turned his inspiration inwards. The balance throughout this piece needs careful attention, and here receives it, as does the continual chromatic to-ing and fro-ing. Amid this complexity, still harmonically challenging more than 80 years later, few listeners will be troubled by the cello’s momentary excursion into the wrong, bass, clef for just two bars in the third movement (3'15").

The combination of deafness and old age removed the danger that Fauré would ever have to play the piano part in public, so he could blithely inform his publisher in 1924 that the scherzo should rocket away at crotchet=166, instead of the crotchet=126 on the first edition. This indication, too, is followed punctiliously and the result is breathtaking – Domus are not quite so startlingly swift in this movement. Here we have the reckless, virtuoso Fauré, a facet not often displayed in his music, but one without which his portrait is incomplete.

The performance of the Schumann is equally fine, and unmarred by the Romantic rhythmic extravagance of Martha Argerich’s version. In the opening paragraph the noble Florestan and the gentle Eusebius are well enough characterised by Schumann not to need any assistance beyond a faithful reading of the score. Rightly or wrongly, I had the impression of an ensemble whose members are absolutely happy with each other: again, the give-and-take is wholly natural, and they make sense of Schumann’s dynamic markings, scrupulously followed.

Throughout the disc Louis Lortie’s lightish pedalling on his Steingräber, while never dry, allows air into textures that can at times sound overcharged, and the fugal passages in the finale, which likewise can sound dutiful, are dispatched with élan. The recording, made at last year’s Moritzberg Festival, is resonant but clear. There is no applause or coughing, so either it was made away from an audience or else they were, with some reason, stunned into silence.