• There are just a few pieces of music you can describe as perfect in every way, and one I would nominate is Gabriel Fauré’s setting of the Requiem. With its serene peacefulness and yearning melodies it is quite unlike many dramatic Requiem masses, from Verdi to Britten. Its contemplative tone omits the famous Dies irae sequence and ends instead with the visionary text In paradisum deducant Angeli. The work took a while to reach a final orchestration, as the composer experimented with several small-scale versions, and recent conductors have tended to prefer these smaller accounts. Philippe Herreweghe recorded such a version some 13 years ago, and now returns to the Requiem in the full orchestral garb with which it was published in 1901 (Harmonia Mundi).
In an ample acoustic, with period instruments, the excellent Collegium Vocale Gent is placed quite far back, and the result is intensely atmospheric if not always perfect in its detail (the first note of baritone Stephan Genz’s “Libera me” takes a while to be heard). With ravishingly beautiful orchestral effects – the restrained brass calls sweeping across the Sanctus always send a shiver down the spine – this is a great reinterpretation of a masterpiece. The companion work is the Symphony in D minor by César Franck, less popular now than it used to be, and undeniably vulgar in parts, but fearlessly, pungently played.
• Fauré’s late Preludes for piano, Op 103, feature on volume 3 of Romanian pianist Alexandra Dariescu’s imaginative Complete Preludes series (Champs Hill), alongside Lili Boulanger’s Prelude in D flat major. But the real discoveries on this disc are the eight preludes written by the 20-year-old Olivier Messiaen in 1928-9. Perhaps because Messiaen went on to write so much great piano music they are neglected, but their original language surely provides the key that links him back to Debussy and forward to Boulez.
• For an apt French complement on Radio 3, look no further than Donald McLeod’s Composer of the Week on Francis Poulenc (BBC Sounds), capturing well the careless wit and suave charm of one of the most distinctive French composers of the 20th century.
