Both listener and performer have been so long attached to the songs Fauré wrote in the period 1860-1890 that it seems to have prevented us from embracing his later, and far more satisfying, works. Lydia, Clair de lune, Après un rêve and about twenty other songs from Fauré’s early and middle years have achieved high status, and rightly so; as far as individual songs go they are the best of the best. But concert audiences will only occasionally encounter one of the late cycles, perhaps Mirages, rarely the complete La Bonne chanson and even less likely Fauré’s perfectly executed final utterance L’Horizon chimérique. Performances of the main work presented here – La Chanson d’Ève – are rarer than hens’ teeth. How this twenty-four minute masterpiece has so completely slipped the net is a mystery and a tragedy. During the planning stages for this recital Charlotte de Rothschild and I both mention to colleagues that we were learning the work and we became used to the response – ‘never heard it, actually never even heard of it’. It was impossible to be too smug since we had only discovered the work ourselves a few months earlier. Adrian Farmer