The best known and most joyously unbuttoned of Gabriel Fauré’s song cycles exists in two forms, with regular piano accompaniment, as it was first published in 1894, and with the addition of a string quintet, an arrangement that the composer made four years later, which is the version that tenor Nicky Spence sings here. The nine songs that make up La Bonne Chanson are all settings of poems by Paul Verlaine that Fauré shaped into a celebration of his love for the married Emma Bardac, who would later become the second wife of Claude Debussy.

With immaculate French diction, Spence marvellously conveys the scarcely contained ecstasy of each song, his vocal lines beautifully cushioned by the strings of the Piatti Quartet and double-bass player. But the cycle occupies less than half the running time of the disc; the remainder is filled with a selection of other, mostly early Fauré songs, which includes such favourites as Lydia, En Sourdine and Clair de Lune, as well as the three settings that make up Poème d’un Jour, Op 21; all are delivered with equal finesse by Spence and pianist Julius Drake.

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