To mark this year’s centenary of Fauré’s death, Stéphane Degout and Alain Planès survey five of his song-cycles in this excellent recital, programmed chronologically, with the piano Ballade effectively forming an interlude to mark the passage of time between La bonne chanson (1892‑94) and the late cycles, beginning with Le jardin clos of 1914. Degout has given us Poème d’un jour before, in a live recital from Paris in 2018 (B Records, 5/19): he has held off, however, from recording the remaining cycles until now, and it has been more than worth the wait. Planès, meanwhile, plays a period piano, an 1892 Pleyel ‘Grand Patron’. You can occasionally hear the pedals, but its clear, dark tone sheds considerable light on Fauré’s bittersweet emotional world and works wonderfully well with Degout’s fastidious, if at times astonishingly direct approach to the songs.

His voice has darkened a bit of late, with a hint of metal has crept into the sound, though his upper registers still soar easily and his colouristic range remains exceptional. Emotions are exactingly probed and conveyed, and every word tells (if you understand French, you will have no need of the texts provided). Poème d’un jour starts out with almost operatic sweep and confidence before subsiding into rueful regret and irony. In La bonne chanson, where we’re very much aware of the greatness of the verse as well as the music, he catches a hint of obsession beneath the cycle’s erotic yearning and its rapturous vision of impending consummation. Degout’s soft singing can be ravishing: ‘La lune blanche luit dans les bois’ really does become ‘l’heure exquise’ in its dreamy tenderness. Planès is at his most poetic here too, carrying the atmosphere over into the elegant Ballade that follows.

The late cycles, meanwhile, suit Degout uncommonly well. Austerity and sexuality rub shoulders in Le jardin clos with its reflections on past and present desire, and Degout’s pointedly sensual way with tone and text offsets the almost declamatory vocal line and the sparseness of Fauré’s piano-writing. Mirages, in one of its finest performances on disc, is equally searching, its great opening evocation of human thought as a black swan ‘gliding slowly on the waters of ennui’ at once astonishingly beautiful and quietly troubling, the cycle’s refined melancholy and nostalgia superbly captured. The nostalgic tone deepens in L’horizon chimérique, Fauré’s final song-cycle, the energy of which reminds us at times of Poème d’un jour at the disc’s start, though we’re also aware of the great distance, both stylistic and emotional, that we have travelled since then. It makes a haunting end to a really outstanding recital. Highly recommended.