If Louis Durey came to music - quite late, after studying at HEC - after hearing Pelléas and Mélisande, he did so almost as an autodidact, as he had only taken a couple of courses at the Schola Cantourm, but his real teachers were his ears. The Debussy connection only lasted a while, and Durey never refused the new paths opened by the atonality of Schönberg or Milhaud's polytonality. It was in Milhaud's company that Durey, alongside Tailleferre, Auric, Honegger and Poulenc became a part of the Group of Six, at least for a few years - inasmuch as the group was more of an informal circle, without a real common vision - until he left it in 1921. One can see, in these "rediscovered" melodies taken from previously-unseen manuscripts, what he took from Debussy, but also from Ravel and Roussel, to say nothing of a touch of the humour of folk music - he was, after all the President of the Fédération Musicale Populaire, following in the footsteps of Roussel and Koechlin. This is a fine album of discoveries from a totally neglected composer; and the listener will surely forgive the Anglo-Saxon twang that accents the French of one of the singers - happily a minority, the other voices being much more convincing. © SM/Qobuz