With the link between the two long careers of Vlado Perlemuter and Gabriel Fauré, this disc takes in a whole era of our musical history. As a teenaged pupil of Saint-Saëns, Fauré was already composing the first of his published songs by 1861 – just before Debussy’s birth, and fourteen years before Ravel’s. Sixty years later, in early 1920’s, Debussy was dead, Ravel had completed the major part of his musical output, a young blond pianist called Vlado Perlemuter had won the major prize at the Paris Conservatoire – and Fauré was putting to paper some of his last works, including the Thirteenth Nocturne of 1921. "The booklet tells us that Perlemuter recalls playing several of the works included to the composer himself, adding wistfully "he was very complimentary, but I don't know how much that means, for he had become quite deaf by then and could hardly hear me". So there can be few people on the platform today with longer or closer ties with this music ... the unaffected simplicity of this artist's approach has an eloquence all its own."