Evoking spaces and possibly rituals well beyond the shores of Europe within its three minutes, the D flat piano Prelude sets the tone for an album of mystery and enchantment that by and large makes a persuasive case for Lili Boulanger as one of the significant might-have-beens in post-Romantic French music. Without undue washes of pedal but aided by a fairly enveloping acoustic, the pianist Antonii Baryshevskyi also offers limpid support to a German ensemble of professional voices in the album’s significant premiere on record, Soleils de septembre. Their diction overcomes a backward microphone placing, and their tenors, in consort, have the right nasal, slightly pinched tone for the idiom.

Standout solos are more variable but I enjoyed Sonja Buhler’s vibrant, forwardly projected soprano to introduce another of the composer’s extended poetic settings from 1911 12, Soir sur la plaine. Light and landscape prick Boulanger’s imagination; and when she moves on from the technique of clusters and pedal-points that bring distant Asia to mind in the way of Ravel’s Shéhérazade, she can also spin a voluptuous melody, clouded with Wagnerian chromatics as well as progressions inherited from her teacher Fauré in the case of Les Sirènes.

By and large, as I said: four of these pieces were conceived with a full-orchestral texture, and for all his skill Baryshevskyi is no match for the drums and sarrusophone that lend so noble a tread to the extended obsequy Pour les funérailles d’un soldat – also predating the Great War – or the brassy, hieratic splendour of late works such as the Vielle prière bouddhique and setting of Psalm 24. To these better-known and more distinctive examples of Boulanger’s craft, Igor Markevitch (EMI, 8/92 – nla) and John Eliot Gardiner (DG, 11/02) bring unrivalled vigour and authority.