‘His music tastes good’: this was Debussy’s tribute to the art of Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921). Goodness and love are words that recur frequently when speaking of Séverac, so much so that the pianist Blanche Selva - his teacher and biographer - wrote: 'The soul of Séverac's music is love, because true love, in reality, is an aspiration, a cry, a caress of goodness.’

Descended from an ancient Languedoc family, related on his mother's side to the Aragons of Spain, Séverac received his first music lessons from his painter father. He studied and worked further afield, becoming a friend and assistant to Isaac Albeniz, but his heart and his musical language remained rooted in his native Languedoc. Thus he was inspired to write En Languedoc, premiered by his friend (and Ravel’s) Ricardo Viñes in 1905.

Impressionism meets folkloric colour and melody in the five movements of En Languedoc, evoking a lakeside reverie, a horseback gallop, a village feast and a profound elegy. This ‘Coin de cimetière au printemps’ (Cemetery Corner in Spring) is one of his most inspired works: his friend Alfred Cortot admired its ‘resignation and ardour, tenderness and bitterness’, with ‘a long, slow melody that expands in all its religious fervour and inconsolable melancholy.’

Cerdaña is another vividly picturesque five-movement suite, cousin to the likes of Albéniz’s Iberia and Granados’s Goyescas, deserving recognition alongside them as a major cycle of Franco-Spanish impressionism from the early 20th century. Serena Valluzzi completes this illuminating introduction to the art of Déodat de Séverac with a teasingly allusive portrait in sound of bathers in the sun, Baigneuses au soleil, from 1908.