I was bowled over by my first encounter with Germaine Thyssens-Valentin – three extraordinary CDs of Fauré on Testament (8/02). Now come two more discs, demonstrating that there was more to her than Fauré, though he is again masterfully represented here.

First, though, a concerto performance – Mozart’s K488 – filled with exuberance and rhythmic drive in the fast movements, with Thyssens-Valentin occasionally almost leaving the orchestra behind (the wind suffer most, with moments of dodgy tuning and bumpy semiquavers). But in other respects, Paumgartner is a supremely supportive conductor and his forces have a lightness that feels very modern. She treats the first-movement cadenza as a soliloquy of great drama, and the runs are as smooth as glass. Only in the unadorned slow movement would I take issue with her interpretation – it is very slow, and Mozart’s already sparse writing doesn’t really work at this tempo. But overall there is much to admire.

She is equally impressive in Debussy, particularly in his dark wartime work En blanc et noir (where she is joined by Jeanne Manchon-Thaïs). The middle movement is particularly telling, the rat-a-tat of the guns starkly etched, while the outer ones are tumultuous and emotionally seering. The two Debussy miniatures and the Fauré items are no less impressive, with the Romances sans paroles delectable and yet utterly unsentimental. Even the final one, a little too slow for my taste (Kathryn Stott gets it spot-on), is so beautifully sung that mere speed ceases to be a consideration. And Fauré’s lone Mazurka is perfectly caught, its weirdly insistent figuration creating a characteristic paradox of the unnerving and the charming.

On the second disc, Thyssens-Valentin is utterly at one with Fauré’s elusive Nine Preludes, even if technically she’s occasionally stretched – in the moto perpetuo of No 2, or in No 8. But it’s for her profound understanding of this music that these recordings are so fascinating.

Before that, two mighty Franck works. In the decades since Cortot put these works so superbly on the map in his 1929-32 readings, they have often been subjected to readings that drag them back into the organ loft, over-emphasising their religiosity and muddying the already dark-hued textures. Not here though – they have gravitas and a sure sense of line and texture, even if once again slow movements tend to be too slow.